Neo-traditional tattoo of a grey bat peeking out of a blue teacup beside a crescent moon, on the forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Bat in a teacup with crescent moon

Neo-trad · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A grey bat with large ears and folded wings sits inside a blue teacup decorated with star and diamond motifs. A pale crescent moon with a dark centre and small star dots sits on the front of the cup, and the handle curves out to the right. Bold black outlines frame the shapes, with soft shading on the bat and tonal blues across the cup.

Neo-trad Forearm Bat Teacup Crescent moon Star

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

At ten past two the grey van rolled up to the barrier with its headlamps off, and Dilys Corran, who had worked nights in the booth at Pant-y-Gwyn for nineteen years, leaned out to find the driver holding a blue teacup through the window as if it were a lantern. Inside it, folded tight as a glove, something with ears was asleep.

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"Declare it," she said, because that was the job. The driver, a thin man called Owen Peckham who smelled of diesel and peppermint, said it was a bat named Sorrow and that it was not, strictly, his. He had bought the cup from a widow in Hay who said the bat came with it, the way a cat comes with a house. "She says he only wakes when the moon's in the cup," Owen said. "Otherwise he's no bother."

Dilys looked at the cup. The crescent on its side was pale as a fingernail, its hollow dark as a pond, and the stars around it had been painted so carefully that she could not tell whether they were glazed or inked. The bat shifted, opened one eye the colour of wet slate, and yawned. The form on her clipboard had a box for livestock. She ticked it with the wrong pen.

She waved the van through without a search and walked to the window of the booth that faced west. She set the cup on the sill and tipped it gently. Sorrow unfolded, wings catching the lamplight, and rose over the road into the dark. Behind her the cup sat empty with its crescent turned up to the sky, and the next lorry was already waiting, its engine sighing.