Black and grey dotwork and line tattoo of a bat with spread wings among leaves, placed on a person's upper back near the shoulder blade.

Bat and leaves across a shoulder blade

Dotwork · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A bat with spread wings and folded ears is drawn in fine black outline, with stippled dotwork and hatched lines shading the body and wing membranes. Leaves and stems curl around the bat, and a partly visible daisy-like flower sits to the left, with another pale floral tattoo at the right edge. The composition is angled across the upper back, with the bat as the main focus and the skin tone lightly washed out by the photo.

Dotwork Botanical Back Shoulder Bat Leaves Daisy Flower Wing

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The bat came aboard at Port Louis wrapped in a bundle of banana leaves, and by the time you noticed it, the cook's boy had already named it Sunday. You found it hanging from the lid of the flour bin, ears folded like a pair of wet gloves, wings drawn round its body as though it were cold. Nobody wanted it near the biscuits. The mate said it would foul the hams, and the captain said nothing at all, which in him meant you would have to deal with it yourself.

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So you did what your mother did with sparrows in the scullery at home. You opened the stern window, set a tin dish of crushed guava on the end of the table and went back to your bread. The bat woke at dusk and unfolded with a sound like someone shaking out a sail. It ate with its thumbs hooked over the rim of the dish, and for three nights the galley smelt of fruit and tar. On the fourth, the captain came down the ladder with his boots in his hand, saw the dark shape on the rafter and said the thing would go over the side before breakfast.

You argued. You argued the way you never argued about the rations, with your hands in the dough and flour up to your elbows. He gave you until the bell. You spent the watch making a sweet paste of figs and honey and leaving it in a saucer by the bin, and you did not sleep.

In the grey before the bell, the window was open and the bin was empty. The bat had gone out over the water with the wind behind it. On the table, beside the saucer, someone had left a short sprig of silver-backed leaves and a single white daisy, its stalk wet, its petals still closed against the cold.