Black and grey botanical sleeve tattoo on an upper arm and shoulder, showing a bat, irises, foxglove-style flowers and leaves in fine engraved-style linework.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Bat and iris sleeve on upper arm

Botanical · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo covers the upper arm and shoulder with a bat in flight at the top, followed by several flowering stems, including irises, and leaves that run down the arm. The work uses fine, hatched linework with soft shading, giving an illustrative, engraved feel. Everything is in black and grey ink, and the design wraps around the arm as a continuous sleeve.

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, the lamp is nearly spent and the bells have gone two. You want to hear how the bat came to be in the glasshouse on Carrow Hill? Old Mrs Tallow kept the night gate of the botanic gardens in Brackmoor, and every night a little brown bat came over the wall and hung from the iron rafters of the orchid house as if it paid rent.

Keep reading

That was the year the Society commissioned Thaddeus Vell to engrave the irises for their new flora. He worked by lantern in the damp, cutting each petal line by line, hatching the falls where the light would have sat and shading the stems until they looked wet. The ink would not take a soft edge, so every stroke had to be decided before it was made. The bat watched him from the rafters. Vell swore it was studying the work, and he laughed at himself for saying so, but whenever he looked up it was the iris the creature watched, never him.

He finished the plate on a Thursday. The next morning Mrs Tallow found the gate bolt drawn back and a single tooth-mark of wax on the copper, right where the leaves ran down toward the edge. Vell said he had never cut a bat into that plate. The printer's proof came back with a small, wing-folded shape in the margin, neat as a signature, and nobody at the Society ever asked about it. They pay for irises, not for what watches them grow.

Mind the step on your way out. It's loose, and the gate remembers who forgets to bolt it.

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