Black and grey traditional-style tattoo of a bat with spread wings and a crescent moon on a person's stomach, above the waistband of dark trousers.

Bat with crescent moon on the stomach

Traditional · Other · Black and grey · Photo

A bat with outstretched wings, a face with three eyes and a teardrop shape above its head is centred on the abdomen, with a crescent moon below it. The linework is bold and the wings are filled with scale-like patterns, dots and diamond hatching, with areas of solid black shading. The image is in black ink and grey tones only, framed by white lace at the top and dark trousers at the bottom.

Traditional Other Bat Crescent moon Teardrop Eye Wing Scale

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You learn the moon by its absence in Ilia, where the dyers hang their cloth on lines strung across the salt road. Telesphorus keeps bats in the loft above the vats, because they eat the moths that would otherwise lay their eggs in the wool. He says a bat with three eyes sees the dead as well as the living, and you have never asked him which of his bats has three.

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Each dusk the colony leaves through the slatted vent, and you count them out as they go, the way you count coins for the tax-men. One evening a single bat stays hanging from the beam, its wings folded close like a fuller's cloth. A drop of water sits on the point of its ear, catching the last of the lamplight. Telesphorus, climbing up behind you with his bad knee, says it is grieving for the moon, which has gone behind the hill and will not come back until someone opens the shutter.

You open the shutter. Silver spills across the boards and lands on the bat's throat, and it unfolds its wings with a sound like a sail filling, the scales along them catching light like fish in a net. It drops past you, circles once over the indigo vats, and dips its face to the surface. The third eye on its brow stays open. The drop from its ear falls into the blue, and the ring it makes spreads outward, then another, until the whole pit shivers under the moon.

Telesphorus says nothing for a long while. Then he lifts the nearest cloth from its line, holds it up to the sky, and the sky and the cloth are the same colour, and neither of you can tell where one ends.