Black and grey tattoo of piano keys curling up the lower leg, with a butterfly and scrollwork above and a partial script line at the bottom.

Piano keys and butterfly on a lower leg

Calf · Black and grey · Photo

A black and grey tattoo shows piano keys twisting diagonally up the leg, with a butterfly near the top and flourishing scrollwork around the keys. The keys are shaded with soft greys and dark outlines, and the scrolls and butterfly wings are rendered in fine detail. Partial lettering sits at the bottom edge of the frame, and an older faded tattoo is visible near the bottom left.

Calf Butterfly Scrollwork Music Script

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The fairground organ had gone flat somewhere between Margate and Maidstone, and by the third evening on the common Nell Harrow could hear it from the caravan steps, a sour half-step sitting under every polka. The gallopers went round anyway. The children on the swing boats didn't mind, but her uncle did, and her uncle was in a hospital bed in Ipswich with a drip in his arm, asking anyone who visited whether the organ had been seen to.

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So she climbed into the painted case that evening with a torch between her teeth. The pipes rose into the dark like reeds, and along the front her grandmother had painted a butterfly, its wings cracked and gold at the edges, the only part of the machine that had kept its colour. Below it the keys were black and white, mostly grey where a hundred thumbs had worn them down. She pressed one. It answered a fraction low, and when she lifted the cover she found a folded square of card tucked against the bellows, the pencil on it faint with damp.

It was a tune, written out in a careful hand. Beneath the notes someone had scrawled, Marion, don't let it drift, and under that, smaller, Sorry about the gallopers. Nell worked out the fingering by torchlight, then sat on the stool while the bulbs came on along the ride one at a time. She played it through twice before the pitch settled, and the wooden horses slowed to a walk as if they had been listening.

When she stepped out, the cold had found the field and the moon was up over the Ferris wheel. The painted butterfly seemed to have shifted in the lamplight, lifted from the wood just enough to show its wings were still open. Nell pulled the cover shut and went to find the phone, to tell Tobias the organ was in tune.