Solid black blackwork bat emblem with ragged, splintered edges and thin radiating streaks, tattooed on the inner forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Bat emblem on a forearm

Blackwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A bold black bat emblem sits across the inner forearm, shown against a plain pale wall. The solid black ink has rough, splintered edges and thin lines that radiate outwards from the wings and body. The image is well lit and the tattoo fills the centre of the frame.

Blackwork Forearm Bat Emblem Symbol

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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 down, the lot of you, and mind the candle, it's the last one the innkeeper could spare. No, you'll not hear the wind over my voice, so listen close. This is the Scarrow Pass story, the one my grandmother told me with her hand on my knee so I'd not fall asleep.

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There was a toll-keeper called Ansel Brack who sat in a stone hut at the summit and wrote every traveller's name in a ledger bound in calfskin. One November a stranger came up in the sleet, paid him in old silver, and asked him to leave the cave under the crags alone. Ansel laughed and said the bats were only bats. The stranger said nothing, only tapped the ledger with one grey fingernail, and went down the far side into the dark.

That night the mouth of the cave split along a seam nobody had seen before, and out poured the bats, black as spilt ink, their wings torn at the edges like paper pulled too hard. They went up over the hut in a great knot and then broke apart, and thin cracks ran out from them across the sky the way frost runs across a window. Ansel shut himself in and kept the lamp lit until morning.

When the sun came up the hut was standing, the ledger was open on the table, and in the middle of the last written page was a black mark the shape of wings, with the paper torn away in lines that reached to every corner. Ansel never wrote another name in it. From that day, at dusk, the bats come out over the pass to count the travellers themselves, and they never miss one. Mind the step on your way out.