Black and grey bat with spread wings, flanked by peony, sunflower and poppy flowers, tattooed across a person's upper back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Bat and flowers across upper back

Botanical · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A large bat with outstretched wings is centred on the upper back, with the wing membranes drawn in fine hatched linework. Peonies, a sunflower and poppy-like blooms with leaves fill the space either side of the bat, shaded with dense stippling. The design is entirely in black and grey ink and is framed by the bare skin of the shoulders and the back of the neck.

Botanical Realism Back Bat Wing Peony Sunflower Poppy Flower Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The bat came into the glasshouse the week my brother's boat went out past the skerry. It hung from the cold frame like a dropped glove, and I thought it was dead until its ears twitched at the lamp. Mam said bats were bad luck in a house, but everything on this island is bad luck if you count the weather, so I left the door open and kept the lamp low.

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Our garden is a stubborn thing. Peonies hate the salt, the sunflowers came up only on the lee side of the wall, and the poppies seeded themselves in the gravel where Granda laid the path forty years ago. Each evening the bat unhooked itself and went out over the wall, and when it came back its fur was dusted yellow and its wings were torn in the same places as the old net on the drying rack. I stopped worrying about the moths after that. The poppies had never been so full.

In August it did not come back. I walked the cliff path with a torch, calling the way you call a dog, and found it in the heather below the lighthouse, folded small, one wing spread flat on the stones as if it were holding a map down against the wind. I carried it home in my jumper. My brother's boat came in the next morning with the engine knocking and nobody aboard but him, grey in the face, and he sat on the step with his hands between his knees and did not say anything for a long time.

By June there was a peony growing in the heather where the bat had lain. The wind bent it flat every evening, and every morning it stood up again, heavy and pale, as if nothing had happened to it at all.