Four solid black bat silhouettes in a blackwork style across the top of a foot, one larger bat at the centre with three smaller ones trailing to the right.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Bat silhouettes across a foot

Blackwork · Other · Black and grey · Photo

A large solid black bat silhouette sits on the top of a foot, with three smaller bat shapes following diagonally towards the outer edge and toes. The bats are filled with flat black ink with crisp edges and no visible shading or interior detail. The pale skin and plain blue background keep the black shapes as the clear focus of the composition.

Blackwork Other Bat Silhouette

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Brother Anselm had counted the bats leaving the belfry every evening for eleven years, and tonight there were four where there should have been five. He stood at the foot of the stair with the lantern hanging from two fingers, listening to the stone breathe. The bell ropes swayed in the dark above him like sleeping animals.

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The fifth one, Brother Cuthbert told him over supper, had gone out the broken louvre in the spring and never come back. Cuthbert was certain the owl that nested in the yew had taken it. Anselm was not certain of anything, except that the count had stood at five since the old abbot's time, and counting was the one task the Rule had given him that he could do without being useful to anyone.

He climbed. The ringers' room smelt of tallow and wet plaster. At the top the louvre let in a blade of grey light, and the bats were already dropping from the sill in a loose line, black against the dusk. Three flew close together. The fourth lagged, wings clumsy, then found the draught and tipped away over the orchard wall.

Anselm waited until the sky was empty. Then he went down to the refectory and wrote in the ledger: five, and one gone home. Beneath it, in smaller letters, he added the name of the young ringer who had gone to sea that spring, the one who used to whistle up at the bats. Nobody had asked him to. It seemed the only way to make the number come out right.