Black line drawing flash design of a winged bat over a ribbon banner reading Children of the Night, What Music They Make, with a castle and roses below.

Bat, castle and roses banner design

Neo-trad · Black and grey · Flash

A black line drawing of a winged bat or dragon-like creature above a curling ribbon banner with lettering, set against a crescent moon. Below the banner sit a gothic castle with arched windows and a cluster of roses with leaves, all outlined with bold, even linework and no shading. The design is shown in black outline only, arranged vertically in a tall composition suited to a sleeve or leg.

Neo-trad Bat Banner Castle Rose Moon Lettering Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The bats found us south of the Cape Verde islands, a dozen at dusk, and by the second dog watch they were hanging from the mainyard like wet umbrellas. Cook said they were the ship's bad luck come home to roost. I said nothing. I had been trimming the lamps since Lisbon and had noticed which cabin the flame always leaned towards, and it was not the mate's.

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The long crate had come aboard at Lisbon under the mate's own eye, two stevedores hauling it up the gangway as though it had a fever. Nobody would say what was in it. Each night my lantern bent towards the forward hold, and each night a sound rose through the timbers, thin and quavering, like a choir of rusted hinges. Cook swore it was wind in the bilge. The wind does not keep time.

On the nineteenth night the mate sent for me with a tin of oil and a pry bar. "Children of the night," he said, half to himself, and I did not ask him what he meant. The lid came away with a shriek that loosed the bats from the rigging. Inside lay a foot of black earth, cold as a churchyard in January, and nothing else at all.

We stood there, the two of us, listening. Then the singing came again from above, and I understood the bats had not been fleeing. They had gone up to the yards to hear it properly. I climbed after them with the lamp clenched in my teeth, the moon sat on the bowsprit like a coin, and every rope on the ship was humming.