Black line drawing design of a butterfly with ornate swirling wings that trails into a musical staff with notes and scrolls, with no body placement shown.

Butterfly with musical staff and swirls

Black and grey · Flash

A black line drawing of a stylised butterfly whose wings are filled with spirals and curls, with its body trailing off to the right. A set of musical staff lines runs out from the wings, carrying round and beamed notes, and further scrolls and flourishes sit beneath and above the staff. The artwork uses bold solid shapes and thin contour lines on a plain white background, with no shading or colour.

Butterfly Music note Musical staff Swirl Scroll Wing

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

I had the lid off the music box by eleven, which was late even for a Tuesday in February. Sleet ticked against the skylight of the workshop above the bus station in Leeds, and the streetlamps on Kirkgate laid orange stripes across my bench. Inside, under a brass cylinder pitted like a sugar lump, sat a painted tin butterfly with wings scrolled in the same curling lines my grandmother used to iron into tablecloths.

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The customer had left a note: "Plays the first four bars, then stops. Please don't fix it into a different tune." I knew the feeling. The pins on the cylinder were bent in a pattern I could read, a row of small hooks and stops, and when I wound it the notes came out like rain falling on a stave of wet wire. I traced each peg with a loupe and copied it onto graph paper, sheet after sheet, until the lines on the page looked like the lines on the bench lamp's shade.

Near two in the morning I found the gap. Three pins were missing, and a fourth had been filed flat on purpose, the way you'd mark a page you meant to come back to. Someone had taken the melody apart and put it back together in a key that wouldn't quite settle. I sat with that for a while. Outside, a night bus sighed at the stop and a taxi driver leaned on his horn for nobody.

I made three new pins from a sewing needle, soldered them into place, and wound the cylinder to the last bar. The tin butterfly lifted its wings a fraction, and the notes ran out of the box and up the wall like smoke, bending round the shelving. It didn't finish the phrase. It stopped exactly where it had stopped for months, and I understood the last note had never been missing at all. I wrapped the box in tissue, wrote "Leave the ending open" on the tag, and switched off the lamp.