Black and grey neo-traditional bat tattoo with lace wings, a skeletal ribcage and a crescent moon across the upper chest and shoulders.

Bat with lace wings across chest

Neo-trad · Chest · Black and grey · Photo

A bat with spread lace-patterned wings sits across the upper chest, with a skeletal ribcage below its face and a crescent moon and arrow motifs above. The linework is bold and the wings are filled with grey shading and fine lace detail, with a small amount of soft pink in the bat's face. The photo is framed close on the chest and shoulders, with the wearer's neck visible and her hands holding a purple top aside.

Neo-trad Blackwork Chest Shoulder Bat Lace Ribcage Crescent moon Arrow Web Skull

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The bat came to the chapel loft the week the Maggie Lorne failed to make harbour. My mother swept it out with the broom, but it came back each dusk, folding and unfolding wings that looked, in the lantern light, like the lace Gran tatted for the altar cloth. Its ribs showed through the skin like the hoops of a herring barrel. Nobody on Scarra kept a bat indoors, and nobody had ever seen one wear lace.

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I hung the crescent moon from the chapel door over its perch, the way Gran hung one over the boats to keep the drowned men from knocking. The bat watched me with eyes like wet coal and did not fly. Each night its wings spread a little wider, and the lace along the edges grew longer, fine threads reaching up toward the rafters like the web the old spider kept in the bell rope.

On the ninth night my father came up from the harbour with his cap in both hands. The Maggie Lorne had been found on the Skerry, her hull sound and her crew nowhere. When I looked again at the perch, a corner of grey cloth was caught in the bat's claws, the same close weave as Callum's Sunday jersey.

I opened the loft shutter and the bat lifted, trailing its silk behind it, and went out low over the water toward the Skerry. A light I had never seen was burning there, small and steady. I have kept the lantern on the chapel sill every night since, and every morning the lace is back on the rafters, a little longer than before.