Black and grey traditional tattoo of a bat with moon phases and small star dots across its wings, placed on a forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Bat with moon phases on a forearm

Traditional · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A bat with spread wings and yellow eyes sits over a background of stars and moon phases, with a full moon at its chest. The bold black outlines and solid black fills are combined with grey shading and small white highlights on the wings and fur. The bat fills the forearm from the wrist side to the elbow side, with ink in black and grey and only the eyes in yellow.

Traditional Forearm Bat Moon Moon phase Star Wing

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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

Mind the step, it's loose, and keep your voice down past the net lofts, for the gulls sleep light and the harbour master sleeps lighter. You want the bat story, then. Everyone in Porthcarne wants the bat story when the fog comes in. Old Tamsin Rowe kept the lamp on the breakwater for forty years, and every night she counted the moon before she trimmed the wick. Full, half, a sliver like a fishhook. She said the moon kept its own accounts, and a body who lost track of it would lose track of the tide too.

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One November a stranger's boat came in without showing a light, drifting on the wrong side of the rocks. Tamsin saw her coming from the glass and went down with a lantern in each hand. The woman aboard had hands like rope and a bat sewn in black thread across her coat, wings spread wide, its eyes two bits of brass. She never said where she'd come from. She only asked which way the moon was going, and Tamsin told her, and the woman laughed the way people laugh at a joke that is not quite funny.

They say the bat flew off the coat that night and took the lamp's reflection out over the water, and the stranger's boat followed it home clean. In the morning the coat hung on the peg by the door, and the thread had gone pale, but every star on its wings was still there, and a full moon sat at its chest where nobody had put it. Tamsin kept the coat until she died. Mind the step now. The tide's making, and I've told you more than the harbour master would like.