Black ink drawing of a butterfly with wings formed from musical notes and scrolling swirls, sketched on lined paper and held up by a hand with dark nail polish.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Butterfly made of music notes design

Black and grey · Flash

A black ink drawing of a symmetrical butterfly whose wings are filled with musical notes on staves, with curling scroll shapes forming the wing edges and the body. The linework is bold and even, in solid black with no shading or colour. The design fills the centre of the frame on lined paper, with a fingertip with dark nail polish holding the sheet at the left edge.

Butterfly Music note Staff Swirl Scroll

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lift at Crane House had been broken since March, so Dolores Pike carried her piano stool up eleven flights every Thursday, one step at a time. The boy on the ninth floor always asked what was in the sack. Sheet music, she told him, hymns and waltzes nobody plays now. He didn't believe her until she sat at the upright in the community room and the stairwell wall began to hum back at her.

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Nobody in Crane House had seen a butterfly since the car park was tarmacked over. Still, the children swore that in the stairwell, where the light came through the cracked window in long bars, moths flew with staves on their wings. Dolores said they were only the tunes people left behind when they moved out, the ones they hummed on the landings and forgot by the next floor. Tobi didn't think a tune could forget anything.

His mother had hummed one every night before the ambulance took her across the river to the hospital with the green roof. Tobi sat on the bottom step with a biro and a sheet of ruled paper from his school bag and copied the tune in careful little circles, then bent the lines into scrolls at the edges until they looked like wings. Dolores found him there at dusk. She didn't correct a single note. She just knelt beside him and sang the first line very quietly.

When he folded the paper and set it on the sill, the wind from the broken pane lifted it. It turned twice in the light, black ink against the glass, and settled on the frame where the hospital windows showed across the water. Tobi hummed the tune again, low, the way his mother had. Somewhere below, a door opened and somebody joined in.