Black and white ink drawing of a bat with outstretched wings, surrounded by rose stems, buds and leaves, shown as a tattoo design with no body part visible.

Bat with wings spread among roses

Botanical · Black and grey · Flash

A bat with wide, outstretched wings sits at the centre of the drawing, with its face and ears detailed in fine hatching. Roses in bloom, buds and leaves are arranged around the bat on both sides, with the stems curving across the lower and outer areas. The image is entirely black ink on white, with dense hatched shading on the wings and soft linework on the flowers and foliage.

Botanical Bat Rose Rosebud Leaves Wing Flower

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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

Sit closer, the fire's gone low and the road won't carry you anywhere before morning. My mother's brother drove the Sallow Pass road when the tarmac still had gaps you could lose a goat in. He carried mail and salt and once, I swear it, a piano with no legs. Nobody knew his name by the second summer, only the thing that rode the bonnet of his lorry. A bat, big as a cat, wings spread wide over the windscreen like it was holding the road up with its own two hands.

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He said it came whenever the dust got thick, and it never bit anyone, never screamed. It just looked at you, with that squashed, cross little face, as if you'd forgotten something important. Then the roses would start. Out of the sand on either side of the road, climbing wild and pale, buds opening in the headlamps. Ninety miles of them, my uncle said, all the way to the ferry town. He never once drove over one.

The summer the water ran out, a girl got in at the crossroads with a jar of cuttings and no shoes. She asked him to stop. He did. She climbed out, planted every cutting in the grit by the signpost, and told the bat thank you. Then she walked off towards the hills, and the bat folded its wings and dropped off the bonnet like a coat slipping off a chair.

When he drove back that way the next spring, the road was lined with roses, every one of them open. That's why the lorries still slow down there, love. Mind you don't pick any.