Black line drawing of a butterfly at the start of a swirling musical staff with notes and scrolls, shown as a tattoo design on a grey background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Butterfly and music staff swirl design

Black and grey · Flash

A black ink drawing shows a butterfly on the left, with its wings detailed in fine linework and ornamental curls. A wavy musical staff with notes and clefs extends from the butterfly to the right, finished with small scroll flourishes. The design is rendered in black on a plain grey textured background with no skin visible.

Butterfly Music note Musical staff Swirl Scroll Treble clef

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Maren, I am writing this on the back of a drug chart because the ward has run out of the good paper, and because you asked me last Sunday what the nights are really like. I still haven't found a way to tell you, so I'll try it sideways.

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A little after three, a pale butterfly came in through the window of Bay Four, which doesn't open properly and never has. It went straight for the bedside locker of Mr Dunmore, who was a bandmaster before his chest gave out. He kept hand-copied staff paper in the drawer, pages of it, the ink gone brown at the edges. He hummed while Sister Adeyemi drew up the morphine, and he kept humming while the butterfly settled on the top sheet, right over a run of quavers.

He told me the curl at the end of the staff was a sign for the tune to go back to the beginning, a da capo, and that you were meant to play it twice or not at all. Then he asked if I could find him a pencil that wasn't blunt. I found one in the sluice, which is not a sentence I expected to write. When I came back he had drawn the swirls on the sheet in ink, little curls and scrolls spilling off the lines like ribbon, and the butterfly had flown off somewhere toward the lift.

He died at ten to six, with the sun just catching the bins in the yard. He asked me to take the page home, and I have it folded in my breast pocket now. When the corridor lights buzz I think about that last bar, which he said was meant to be played twice. Love, Dad.