Black line drawing of a butterfly formed from musical staff lines and notes on a cream background, shown as a flash design.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Butterfly made of musical staves and notes

Black and grey · Flash

A butterfly with outstretched wings is built from curving five-line musical staves, with black note heads, stems and flags scattered across the wings. The linework is black ink with varied line weight and curling swirls at the wing tips and the trailing tail of staff lines. The design sits on a plain cream background with no colour.

Butterfly Musical note Staff lines Music Swirl

Find an artist for this

Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mind the step, that's the one that took Tom Hanley's ankle and his wife's good opinion of him. Sit where the lamp can reach you. You asked about the Mary Ellen's last trip, the one the papers got wrong, so listen close, because I'll only tell it once before the tide turns.

Keep reading

Skipper Ruairi Dunn had a deckhand called Eli, a thin lad who wrote music on the back of fish crates with a carpenter's pencil. He drew the lines five to a stave and filled them with little black seeds he called notes. Every time the net came up heavy he'd hum a bar and the gulls would take it up, screaming in the wrong key, and the men swore he'd jinxed them. They didn't stop him, mind. The catch was always good.

Then came the blow off the Cold Hammers, the sky gone the colour of slate and the waves standing up like men at a wake. A gust tore the page of music from Eli's coat, the only copy of the tune his mother used to sing him, and it went skittering across the deck and out over the rail. He went after it. Half the crew reckoned he'd drown, but the sheet came down on the water and unrolled like a flag, and the notes lifted off the paper one by one. They spread into wings, black and bright, and rose above the mast with the gulls wheeling underneath. Eli climbed the rope after them, singing, and the storm lay down flat as a dog.

So that's the Mary Ellen. Some nights when the harbour's quiet you can still hear the bar where the wings open, if you've the ears for it. I hum it myself when I'm mending nets, and the gulls still answer, badly. Now pass me that cup, and hold your tongue for the second verse.