Black and grey traditional bat head tattoo with open fanged mouth and white eyes, placed on the thigh.

Bat head on the thigh

Traditional · Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

A bat head with large pointed ears, round white eyes and an open mouth showing fangs, with fuzzy fur-like edges around the face. Bold black outlines, solid black fills and dotted grey shading define the form, with white highlights left as bare skin. The design is centred on a plain pale patch of skin, with a dark garment visible at the top right edge.

Traditional Thigh Bat Fangs Eye

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Brother Anselm rang the vesper bell at Saint Oswin's every evening, and every evening the bats came out of the louvres to watch him do it. They hung from the beams above the ropes with their wings folded tight, their round eyes shining in the dusk, and the younger novices said they were looking for their supper in his hair. The abbot called them the devil's mice and ordered the louvres smoked shut with wet straw. Brother Anselm obeyed, as a monk should, and the next morning the bats were back, more of them than before, clinging to the rafters like dark fruit.

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That was the winter the river rose over the cellar steps and the grain went black. The monks ate turnips boiled in the same water for six weeks, and then only the water. One night in the Advent frost a girl came up the valley road with a fever and a letter for the abbot, and the porter shut the gate on her. Brother Anselm heard her coughing under the wall. Against the rule, he unbarred the little door at the foot of the tower and sat with her by the bell ropes while the bats circled his lantern, patient as moths.

In the morning the abbot found them both there, the girl asleep on Anselm's cloak. He was to be shut in the tower for seven days on bread and water. On the third night a sack of barley stood at the foot of the stair, and nobody could say how it came there. On the fifth there was a ham wrapped in cloth, and on the seventh a brown hen that did not seem to mind the stone floor. The abbot said nothing about it, but he stopped sending the smoke.

The louvres stayed open after that. Each evening the bats hung above the ropes, and the bell went out over the water as if someone unseen had pulled it.