Black line drawing of a butterfly whose wings are formed from musical staff lines and notes, with swirling flourishes around it.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Butterfly made of musical staves and notes

Fine line · Black and grey · Flash

A butterfly is drawn in black linework, with its wings built from curving musical staff lines and round note heads. Hatching and fine strokes shade the upper wing and body, and loose swirls and trailing lines extend from the wing edges. The image is monochrome on a white background, with the composition centred and the staves flowing diagonally down to the lower right.

Fine line Butterfly Musical note Staff lines Wing Swirl Music

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lamp stopped turning at ten past four, and by the time I reached the lantern room the glass was beaded with salt and a small brown moth was walking round the inside of the lens as if it owned the place. Dad had written the flash pattern in the logbook years ago, not as numbers but as crotchets and minims on five ruled lines, because he had sung in the chapel choir at Porthgwidden before the cliffs took the chapel. Two flashes, a rest, a long one. I had always thought it looked like a tune nobody would ever finish.

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The fog came in before tea. I wound the clockwork with the iron key until my wrist ached, and when I looked up the moth had gone, and in its place on the sill sat a butterfly, or what I first took for one, its wings drawn in staff lines that curled out over the brass like ribbon. Dad used to say the sea was a score no one could read. I thought he was being poetic until I saw the note heads on the wings sitting exactly where the flashes fell: one, two, rest, long.

I set the beam by the wings, not the log. It swung out across the water in that little dance, and somewhere in the murk a trawler's horn answered with a note I could almost name, then another, and the boat came in round the Skerry by ear rather than by light. Dad's pencil was still behind my ear. I took it out and drew the next bar on the back of the log, a loop of staves lifting off the page.

At first light the sill was bare, but the logbook had a new page: five ruled lines, and two wings drawn in pencil over the sea, flashing their one, two, rest, long, the way Dad would have wanted it sung.