Black and grey botanical tattoo of an upside-down bat with a magnolia branch, a small flower and a moth, on a person's forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Bat and magnolia on a forearm

Botanical · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A bat hangs upside down across the forearm, with its wings spread and drawn in fine hatched linework and stippled shading. Magnolia blooms, a smaller five-petalled flower and a moth sit above it, with the moth near the top of the arm. The tattoo is in black and grey against bare skin, with a tattoo studio's framed flash visible on a red wall behind.

Botanical Forearm Bat Magnolia Flower Moth Branch Wing

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mrs Ada Pennyfeather had been paid to draw a magnolia for the Lister Society's folio, not a bat, and she said so to the man who had brought the creature in a shoebox. He was a night carter from the docks with a cough and a hat he never took off, and he set the box on her drawing board as though it were a lantern. "It's dead," he said. "Only it isn't quite."

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The bat had come in on a tide of cargo from the south, and the yard behind the chapel had a magnolia that bloomed out of season every year on the night of the first frost. Ada laid the bat on its back on blotting paper and began to hatch its wings with a steel nib, line by careful line, because hatching was the only patience she trusted. Each stroke took the length of a hymn. The ribs showed through the membrane like the struts of a church window.

Near midnight the bat turned itself over, hooked its feet onto the edge of the board, and hung there upside down, wings unfolding like wet paper. The magnolia blooms on her table opened in answer. A moth the colour of weak tea came to the lamp and settled on the highest petal as if it had been invited. Ada did not stop drawing. She had learned that the thing you are looking at will leave you if you look away.

By morning the folio held a bat drawn upside down, a branch of white flowers, and a moth near the top of the sheet. The man with the hat came back for the shoebox and found it empty. Ada signed the page with her initials and the date, and left a single stippled dot beneath the bat's chin, where it had looked at her last.