Traditional style tattoo of a bat head with a crescent moon and star above it, placed on the calf.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Bat head and crescent moon on a lower leg

Traditional · Calf · Mixed · Photo

A bat head with spread ears, bared fangs and a red nose sits below a crescent moon containing a four-pointed star. The design uses bold black outlines, solid fills and shaded grey tones on the bat's face and ears. Orange, red, yellow and grey ink make the image colourful, and the tattoo is centred on a pale leg against a dark background.

Traditional Calf Bat Moon Crescent moon Star Fangs

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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

The bat came aboard at Valparaíso, folded into the coil of the mainsheet like a glove somebody had dropped, and by the time the Hesper cleared the headland you had already decided it was an omen. Bosun Pryce disagreed. He crouched beside the coil with his one good eye narrowed, studied the spread ears and the bared teeth, and told you to leave it be. "Bats don't ride ships for luck," he said. "They ride them because they're going somewhere they can't get to on their own."

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For nine weeks the creature kept to the lee of the galley chimney and came out only when the moon was up. You learned its hours from the crescent over the masthead, thin as a paring, with a single star caught in its belly like a sequin on a cheap coat. Cook fed it crusts soaked in stewed tea. The men argued over whether it was lucky, and stopped arguing once the glass began to fall and the Horn started showing its teeth.

Off Cape Horn the mainsail split in the middle watch, and you were sent aloft with Pryce's marlinspike shoved through your belt. Halfway up the ratlines the bat dropped past your shoulder, wheeled once in the lantern light and went off towards the lee rail. You never saw it again. Pryce was waiting at the foot of the shrouds when you came down, and he didn't ask what you'd seen.

In Falmouth, months later, a tattooist on the quay with ink under every fingernail asked what you wanted. You told him a bat, and a moon. He drew the moon first, then the star inside it, then the head, wings flung wide like something still falling. "Ears out," he said, tapping the paper. "That's how they catch the wind."