Black bat symbol made of text on the upper arm, with red repeated HA lettering forming a grinning shape beside it.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Bat symbol and laughing text on upper arm

Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

A black bat emblem is built from small overlapping marks and text, with a solid black central shape and a few small bats drifting off to the left. To the right, red repeated HA syllables form a wide, curved smile that tapers into the bat's outline. The ink is set against lightly tanned skin, with a plain light background and the arm filling most of the frame.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The job came in on a wet Tuesday, folded inside a tin mug: a stranger's sketch of a bat, with a note asking for it to be set in foundry type, every letter picked by hand. I had run the Harbour Press for thirty-one years and never once been asked to make a picture out of words. Mr Alder, who owned the place before me, used to say a printer's job was to disappear. I did not disappear. I sat at the case until the lamp hummed, sorting capitals into the wings of something that looked like it wanted to fly off the page.

Keep reading

The second order came on the Friday, and it was in red. The stranger wanted a grin, long and curved, built from the letters H and A set over and over, a laugh that would not stop once it started. I told him red ink was dear. He said he would pay for the whole tin. He counted coins from a purse that clinked like a fruit machine, then stood by the window and watched me lock the chase, smiling the entire time, and I could not say whether he was enjoying the work or the joke.

On the Sunday the lighthouse keeper's boy came in with a scrap of paper he had found pressed against a mooring post at the tide line. It was the bat, printed backwards, the red smile running into its wings and smudged where the sea had got to it. I held it up to the lamp and read the first line aloud the way you read a proof, and the words came out as laughter, one HA after another, until the boy was laughing too and neither of us knew why.

I have the scrap pinned above the case now. Every morning I set the first line in the dark, and every morning I catch myself grinning at the wrong side of the bat.

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