Colour tattoo of a monarch butterfly with a swirling music staff, notes and treble clef on the side ribs, in fine black linework.

Monarch butterfly and music staff on ribs

Fine line · Ribs · Mixed · Photo

A monarch butterfly in orange, yellow and black sits on a curling music staff that carries small musical notes and a treble clef at the top. The butterfly is shaded and coloured, with white dots along the wing edges, while the staff and notes are drawn in thin black linework. The design wraps diagonally across the side of the torso against plain skin, with a dark garment visible at the lower edge.

Fine line Ribs Butterfly Monarch butterfly Music staff Musical note Treble clef Swirl

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The butterflies came over the harbour wall in the second week of October, when the nets were already drying on the posts and nobody bothered to look up from the boats. My grandfather said they were heading for Mexico, which seemed a long way for anything with wings that weighed less than a postage stamp. He kept a notebook of their landings on the stone, and beside every date he had drawn a little staff with the notes he heard in the gulls.

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I was twelve the year he taught me to read that staff, sitting on an upturned crab pot with his old fiddle across my knees. Fishing families in Porthkennack did not usually have time for music, but he had time for almost everything except the tide. He said a tune was a map if you knew where to start. We walked the harbour arm every evening, and he would stop wherever a monarch settled and play whatever note it seemed to be resting on.

The winter he went into the hospice on the hill, I kept walking the arm alone. One evening a butterfly lifted off the rail and wheeled up towards the lighthouse, and I found I was humming the sequence he always ended on, the one that climbed and then curled back down like rope being coiled. I wrote it on the back of the tide table, the way he would have, and drew the notes where its wings had been.

In spring a parcel came from the hospice. Inside was his bow, wrapped in a tea towel, and a single line in his cramped hand: keep it moving. I took the bow to the arm the next October. The monarchs came over the wall in their hundreds, and when one landed on the rail I played the curl of the tune for it, low and slow, until it lifted and turned south over the sea.