Grey stippled bat with spread wings above a cluster of red, pink and yellow flowers and green leaves, drawn as a botanical tattoo design on cream paper.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Bat with red and pink flowers

Botanical · Mixed · Flash

A grey, stippled bat with outstretched wings sits centrally, with its body shaded in fine dots and hatching. Beneath it, a dense arrangement of red and pink flowers, small yellow blooms, dark buds and green leaves forms a symmetrical border. The design is set on a cream, textured background with mostly black and grey linework and shading, plus colour in the flowers.

Botanical Bat Flower Leaves Bud Wing

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Ada had the first tins out before the blackbirds started, and she didn't look up when the bat came down the flue. It did this most nights in March, dropping from the vent above the proving cupboard with a soft tick of claws on tin, then folding its wings tight as a closed umbrella. Her nephew Col said it was a pest. She said it had been here longer than the mixer.

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Col came in at half four with his hood up and flour already on his boots, complaining that the lane was black as a cellar. He stopped when he saw the bat hanging from the rack above the sacks, wings stretched wide and dark against the whitewash, as if someone had pinned up a map of somewhere nobody had been. Ada was sweeping crumbs toward the drain. "It's only here for the flowers," she said. "The bramble on the back wall, the sallow by the river. It goes round in the dark and carries the pollen on its face."

Col didn't believe her, so she showed him: a jam jar of wild roses from the hedge, lined up on the sill, petals going brown at the edges. Some mornings she found them dusted gold in the centre, when the bat had been at them. He pushed his hands into the dough, pressed, folded, and for a while neither of them spoke, only the oven ticking and the bat shifting its feet.

At ten to six Ada unlatched the back door a finger's width, the way she always did, and the cold came in smelling of wet earth and hawthorn. The bat dropped off the rack, opened its wings, and was gone over the yard wall before the first van pulled up. On the step lay a single pink rose, its stem bitten clean. Col picked it up and put it in the jar without being asked.