Solid black blackwork bat emblem with jagged, splintered edges and spiky rays tattooed on a forearm.

Bat emblem on a forearm

Blackwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A solid black bat emblem with a pointed central silhouette and wide, angular wings fills the width of a forearm. The edges are ragged and splintered, with thin spikes radiating outward from the wings and base. The skin is pale and evenly lit against a plain white wall, which keeps the flat black ink as the only strong contrast in the frame.

Blackwork Forearm Bat Logo

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mr Halloran's press room above the chandler's on Dock Street smelled of lamp oil and lead, and the block that came up from the foundry that March was wrong from the first proof. Someone had cut a bat for the Whitsun fair handbills, a pointed head and wings spread wide, but the woodcut had split down the middle where the grain ran against the knife. Every pull came off the press with the edges torn into little spikes, as if something had flown through a window.

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My job was to ink the forme and keep the rollers clean, and I wanted to scrap the thing. Halloran wouldn't hear of it. "The fair pays by the sheet," he said, "and nobody reads a handbill for its accuracy." So we ran four thousand. Old Mrs Pyle from the bakehouse stopped me on the steps with one folded in her apron and asked whether the bat was meant to be leaving or arriving.

I didn't have an answer then. Three nights later the fair caught fire on the common, and the posters pinned along the lanes were the only paper left unburnt in half the parish, flapping against the hedges. Men read them by the light of the blaze, and the splintered wings looked to them like the shape of something moving.

Halloran kept the block on the shelf after that, uncut and unsold. When I left the trade I took it with me, wrapped in oilcloth, and I still ink it sometimes at my kitchen table, pressing it down onto a clean sheet and watching the ragged edges come up black and certain. I tell myself the cracks were the grain's fault.