Realistic black and grey tattoo of a bat emblem on a forearm, appearing to tear through the skin around it.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Bat emblem torn through skin on a forearm

Realism · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A tattoo of a bat emblem with a cowl-like shape, shaded in black and grey with smooth highlights on the ears and edges. The surrounding skin is drawn as ripped and peeling back to reveal the emblem beneath, with soft shading on the torn flaps. The photograph is taken straight on at the forearm against an indoor background with a window.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The hoarding outside the Regal had been up since the spring, a sheet of painted board with a bat across it so black the paint seemed to suck the light in. Nobody in Hallam Cross could say who had put it there. Dad said the council. Mrs Pettigrew at the post office said it was the Lyle boy, back from National Service with ideas. I only knew that every morning I walked past it on the way to Tilly's, and every morning it looked a little more like it was trying to climb out.

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In October the rain came sideways for three days. On the Thursday I found the hoarding half down, the wind having got under one corner and peeled the board from its frame. Behind it the brick of the cinema wall showed through, and there, painted in red lead long before anyone in town could remember, was a wide-winged shape with ears like two cut blades. The bat had not been put up at all. It had been under the advertisement for a film about a sea captain all along, waiting for something to tear the layers off.

I stood in the drizzle with my satchel dragging at my shoulder and tried to work out who would paint a thing like that on a cinema wall. Mr Okonedo at the library had a box of old programmes from the thirties. I thought the answer might be in there, but the box had been damp for years, and the pages came apart in my hands in flakes.

The next morning the hoarding was gone and the bat was just brick, the paint worn to a rumour. I went to the Regal anyway. Mr Lyle was on the ladder, scraping. He didn't turn round. 'Leave it,' he said. 'It only shows through when the weather's honest with it.' I have never worked out what he meant, but I still take the long way past that wall, and when the light is low I can see the shape of it, waiting under the new paint.

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