Black bat tattoo with purple, curled-tip wings on the upper back near the shoulder blade.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Bat with purple wings on the upper back

Back · Mixed · Photo

A black bat sits at the centre of the design with its wings spread wide. The wings are shaded in purple and outlined in black linework, ending in curled tips, while the body is a solid black silhouette. The tattoo covers the upper back beside the shoulder blade, photographed from behind with the wearer's head out of frame.

Back Bat Wing

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

Nobody on the Harker and Wynn fair could agree where the bat came from. Ada swore it dropped out of the sky over Boston the night the generator packed in, Dad said a man with one eye sold it to him for a crate of stout, and I said nothing, because I was the one who found it in the ghost train, hanging upside down from the painted rafters with its wings folded like a pair of old umbrellas.

Keep reading

It was made of wire and black oilcloth, with purple gauze stretched over the wings and the tips curled tight like fiddleheads. When the train ran, it swooped above the carriages on a steel rod and the children screamed themselves hoarse. By the time I got it down, the wire had rusted through at one shoulder and a wing had split along its spine. I spent three winters in the back of the caravan with a tin of size and a reel of silk thread, lacing the gauze back on a strand at a time while the paraffin heater ticked and Ada muttered that a bat was no use to anyone who couldn't eat it.

On the last night at Skegness, the wind came off the North Sea hard enough to lift the canvas. I went out to check the guy ropes and saw the bat unhook itself from the rafters and climb. It hung over the sodium lamps for a moment, purple wings lit from underneath like stained glass, then slid over the dunes towards the water. Dad said the mechanism had finally seized. Ada said nothing at all, and that night she set two cups out on the step, one for me and one for whatever had gone.