Black and grey fine line bat in flight tattooed on the ribs, with stippled dotwork shading on its wings and body.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Bat in flight on the ribs

Dotwork · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A bat with spread wings is shown in mid-flight, drawn in thin black outlines. The wings and body are filled with stippled dotwork shading that gives them dimension and texture. The tattoo sits on the side of the torso against bare skin, with a floral fabric and a hand partly visible at the edge of the frame.

Dotwork Fine line Ribs Bat Animal Wing

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The bat got into the marquee during the speeches, somewhere between the second toast and the vicar's joke about the hymn sheets. You saw it first because you were looking up at the strings of bulbs, the way you always do when you are trying not to look at your new husband's brother. It dropped from the rafters in a long loop, wings wide as a tea tray, and the whole field of white linen went quiet except for Aunt Maud, who said, "Well, that's the bride's luck sorted," and went back to her trifle.

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Dorothy from the cricket club wanted it out. Gerald wanted a broom. You wanted nothing, only to watch it, because a bat against the cream canvas looked like ink blotted on a napkin, all those little dots of shadow pooled along its arms as if someone had breathed on the dusk and let it settle. It circled the cake once, then the lanterns, then found the open flap at the far end where the evening had gone blue and cold.

Somebody propped the flap wider with a tray of coffee cups. The bat hesitated on the edge of the light, folding and unfolding its fingers as though counting something, and then it was gone over the car park and the hedge where the cows stood chewing in the dark. Nobody clapped. Gerald said it was a sign of something, and Maud said it was a sign of a draught.

You stood for the first dance with cake on your fingers and the band playing something from the seventies. Your husband spun you slowly, badly, laughing into your hair, and you thought of the bat out past the hedge, learning the fields by its own small sounds, owing nobody a toast or a dance or a door held open for it.