Traditional style tattoo of a grey bat with spread wings, surrounded by yellow lightning bolts and a red burst, on a forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Bat with lightning bolts on a forearm

Traditional · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A bold tattoo of a grey bat with spread wings sits at the centre of the design, with its head turned toward the viewer. Yellow lightning bolts radiate outward on both sides, and a red burst behind the bat adds a strong focal point. Heavy black outlines and flat, solid fills give the piece a classic bold look, and the design fills most of the frame against dark leather.

Traditional Forearm Bat Lightning Lightning bolt

Find an artist for this

Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit down, the lot of you, and keep your hands off that pan till I've done. Aye, the bat. You've all been staring at it since you came aboard, and not one of you has asked why a grey thing with a face like a squashed loaf has lightning coming off it like sparks off a blacksmith's anvil. I'll tell you. Old Hobday sailed with that bat on his arm the year the Marigold went round the Horn with a cook who couldn't boil an egg and a mate who sang in his sleep.

Keep reading

That winter the Fenwick Reach took three boats in a week, and the Marigold ran into the back end of the same gale with her foremast sprung and the crew bailing with pudding basins. There was a bat in the rigging, a little grey brute that had come aboard at Valparaiso in a crate of onions and never once been asked to leave. It lived on crumbs from the galley and hung upside down from the mainstay like a wet sack of washing. When the first bolt walked down the shrouds, every man on deck went flat, and the bat came off its perch and flew straight up into the light, wings out, screaming like a kettle.

We thought it was mad, and maybe it was. But every bolt that came after that night found the bat first, ran down its wings and into the iron of the rail, and the rail spat blue while the deck stayed dry. Hobday swore the creature was catching the lightning for us the way a dog fetches a stick. When the sky finally cleared, the bat dropped onto the binnacle, shook itself, and sat there wheezing while the whole crew cheered it like a bishop.

Next morning it was back on the mainstay, singed at the wingtips and in a fine temper. The cook gave it a crust. Hobday offered it his tot of rum, which it refused, and that's the only time I ever saw a bat look insulted. So when you're tempted to say that's only a picture, remember it wasn't drawn for a wall. It was drawn for the storm, and the storm had a fair bit to answer for.