Black flash design of a butterfly whose body is a treble clef and whose wings are formed from bass clef curls and note heads, shown on a plain white background.

Butterfly made of musical symbols

Black and grey · Flash

A solid black butterfly design on a white background. The body is a treble clef, and the upper and lower wings are built from curled bass clef shapes and round note heads, with two note heads forming the antennae. The linework is bold and solid with no shading, and the composition is centred and symmetrical.

Butterfly Treble clef Bass clef Music note

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The abbot found the butterfly before I did, which is how I came to be standing in the scriptorium after Compline with a lamp, staring at a page I had copied myself three days earlier. The gradual for the Easter Vigil was finished. The capitals were gold, the staves ruled true, and in the lower margin, where no brother was permitted to put anything but a correction, sat a black butterfly no larger than my thumb.

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Its body was a treble clef, and its wings were curled bass clefs with round note heads for eyes. Two note heads sat at the top as antennae. The ink was solid and unshaded, as black as the scriptorium floor. I knew the hand. Brother Anselm had taught me to lay down a stave, and he had told me once that music was only a way of making the air move in order, and that a sensible monk kept the air where the rule put it.

Anselm was not in the scriptorium. He was in the infirmary with a cough that would not leave, and he had not touched the book in a month. I carried the lamp to the window and held it against the old glass. Below, the choir was practising the Exsultet, the altos a half-beat behind as they always were, and I thought of Anselm lying in his bed, listening through the wall and marking each error with one finger on the blanket.

In the morning the gradual went up to the lectern as it was. Nobody mentioned the margin. When the deacon began the first line, the page lay open in the light from the east window, and the butterfly was gone. I searched the vellum through the whole service and found only a faint grey smudge where something had been scraped away, and beneath it a single note in my own hand that I did not remember writing: the clefs fly where the rule cannot follow.