Black blackwork tattoo of a bat with spread wings in front of a spired gothic castle, on the calf near the knee.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Bat and gothic castle on a leg

Blackwork · Calf · Black and grey · Photo

A bat with outstretched wings hangs in front of a tall, spiked gothic castle, with horizontal striped bands below the towers. The linework is bold and solid, with hatched shading in the wings and body and areas of fully filled black. The tattoo is entirely black ink on a dark background, and the composition wraps around the leg.

Blackwork Calf Bat Castle Spire Wing Stripe

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

No, sit closer, the fire's gone to nothing and I'll not raise my voice for the ones at the back. You want the bat, then you'll have the castle too, because the bat was never anything without it. Up on the north crag above Scarra there was a house nobody built, only grew, its spires shoving up out of the rock like the fingers of a drowned man. The laird's grandson lived in it with his mother and a clock that ran eleven minutes fast.

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Every dusk the bats came off the tower in a black sheet, and every dusk old Mairi Cole stood at the foot of the stair with a bucket of salt and counted them. She counted nine one summer and only eight the next. The ninth, she said, had gone to live in the boy. Nobody believed her, but the boy stopped eating bread and started hanging from the rafters by his knees, and when the wind came off the Atlantic he would spread his arms and laugh at it.

The striped stones on the lower wall were the tide-marks. The sea had climbed that high in the great storm and left its salt in bands, white and black, one for every year the house stood empty. Mairi said you could read the whole history of the island in them if you were patient and didn't drink.

One night in October the boy went up the spires and did not come down. In the morning there was only the clock, still eleven minutes fast, and a bat clinging to the stone where he'd been standing. Mairi took the salt bucket up herself. She said the ninth bat looked at her with his mother's eyes and asked for bread, and she gave him the whole loaf.