Black and grey engraving-style tattoo of a bat and a firefly with dotted arcs and dashed lines on a forearm.

Bat and firefly with dotted geometry on a forearm

Dotwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A bat with spread wings sits in the lower part of the forearm, below a winged insect that resembles a firefly with a radiating sunburst behind it. The bat and insect are drawn with dense cross-hatched and engraved linework, and the surrounding dotted arcs and dashed lines add a geometric framing. The tattoo is entirely black and grey on pale skin against a plain light wall.

Dotwork Geometric Forearm Bat Insect Sunburst Dotted line Arc Wing

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The bat came to the churchyard wall the week the bell cracked, and by September the sexton's daughter, Nell Harrow, had stopped pretending she could not hear it scratching at the shutters after dark. It was a small brown thing with ears like folded envelopes and a face that looked permanently surprised. Her father said it was a bad omen. Nell said it was hungry, which was worse, because nobody in Thorne Bottom had anything to spare for a bat.

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The firefly came up from the water meadows that autumn, a stray with a lantern in its belly and no sense of direction. It flashed at the hedges and got lost. The bat, who could find a moth in the dark by its heartbeat, found the firefly on the third night and sat with it on the lych-gate until its light steadied. After that they kept an arrangement. The firefly blinked out the field boundaries in short and long flashes, and the bat carried them across the fen on wide, looping arcs, down the dotted line of the drove road to the mill, where Nell waited with a shaded lamp and a notebook of her father's old surveying sums.

In October the flood came early and the drove road went under. The firefly sat on the crown of the sunken gatepost and would not move, its light dimming by the hour, and the bat went out over the black water three nights running. On the third night Nell saw two small lights rise out of the flood together, one bright and one clumsy, and she wrote down their bearings in dash and dot, exactly as the bat had taught her to read them.

When the water went down, the bat slept in the bell tower through the winter. In spring the firefly returned to the meadows and burned its sunburst at the foot of the churchyard wall. Nell still left the shutter open. Sometimes, if the wind was right, a bat dropped out of the dark to look at the light, then turned away, satisfied it had been seen.