Colour photo of a black bat wing fading into red with scattered red, green and purple HA lettering on the upper arm.

Bat wing and laughing HA lettering on upper arm

Blackwork · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

A solid black bat wing shape sits on the upper arm and fades into a soft red edge where it meets a cluster of hand-drawn HA letters. The letters are in red, green, purple and dark tones, scattered in loose rows that suggest laughter. The skin is pale and the image is taken straight on, with the design filling most of the frame.

Blackwork Lettering Upper arm Bat Wing Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Tom,

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The big top came down on Tuesday, and the lads folded the last of the red canvas in the car park at Stowmarket while the rain came sideways off the fens. Mrs Dagworth wanted the bat wing kept, the one cut from black sailcloth that hung over the trapeze, so I rolled it into the tarpaulin and it rides in the van now with the spare poles. You'd laugh. Nobody has laughed at the act since the spring, not properly.

Here is the thing I should have told you. Old Ptolemy had a rule that the flyer never laughs on the wire, because a laugh moves the shoulders and the shoulders are the whole trick. So for twenty years the ha-ha was painted on the programme, scrawled in red and green and purple on every bill, and the crowd did the laughing for us. This last August the painter's boy ran short of ink and the letters came out thin and wandering, scattered across the bills like a spilt tin of sweets, and the kids in the front row laughed harder at those than at anything the clowns did.

Mrs Dagworth says the fade on the wing is where the sun went down behind the tent every evening, that the black was night and the red was the last of the light going out. I told her that was a lot of meaning for a bit of sailcloth. She told me to shut up and pass the kettle.

I'm keeping the wing. When the winter pitch is found I'll hang it in a barn somewhere and watch it catch the draught like something still trying to fly.

Love, Daisy