Colour tattoo of a bat symbol with red roses filling the wings and a black centre, on the inside of a forearm, in a traditional style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Bat symbol with roses on a forearm

Traditional · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A bat shape sits across the forearm, with red roses with purple and blue shading filling each wing. The black centre contains green and yellow shapes with orange and red striped detailing. Bold dark outlines and flat fills give the design a traditional look, set against a plain indoor background.

Traditional Forearm Bat Rose

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The sign over Vell's petrol stop had been dead since the spring of 1979, which is why nobody at the depot believed me when I said it hummed at two in the morning. I was hauling feed up the old road out of Marrow Flats, the wind had dropped so completely that I could hear the transformer above the diesel, and there it was, a black bat the width of a lorry, its red roses glowing like coals on the wings.

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Mabel Quist ran the place with her brother Odell until he walked out into the wash one August and didn't come back. She painted the sign herself the year after. A bat, she told me over a mug of coffee that tasted of scorched tin, because bats come out when the heat's gone and the road gets lonely. She gave the wings roses so the drivers would have something to look at besides the dark. In the middle of the black body she put two little green and yellow faces, striped orange and red like the blankets on Odell's cot, which she had never moved.

I asked her why the sign was humming if the power had been cut for forty years. She didn't answer. She slid a ledger across the counter, open to a page of names and dates, most of them crossed through. The last entry was my own cousin's name, from a run he'd made in February. I hadn't known he'd come this way.

I drove out before the sun cleared the ridge. In the mirror the bat's wings flared once, red, then went still. I've taken the road in daylight every run since, and I still hear the hum, faint, under the engine, every time I pass that dead sign.