Black bat wing tattoo merging into red scrawled HA laughter text on an arm, in a black and white photograph with red highlights.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Batman bat symbol and Joker laughter on an arm

Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

A solid black bat-wing shape, styled after the Batman logo, sits on the left of the frame and fades into red hand-drawn lettering that reads as laughter. The black ink has a textured, slightly mottled finish, while the red lettering is sharp and uneven in its strokes. The photograph is mostly greyscale, which makes the red ink stand out against the skin.

Upper arm Batman Joker

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Our Tommy had a cough like a cart over setts, and every shift he drew something on the lamp-room wall before he went down. Not a pit pony, not a horse brass like the rest of us. A bat, scratched into the blacked-over slate with the back of his knife, its wings spread above the hooks where our lamps hung. Nobody asked him why. Mam said it was the dark getting into his head.

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Then in the February the water came up through the Low Main and we were cut off on the wrong side of the district for eleven hours. The air went thin and the men went quiet in the way that frightens you more than shouting. Tommy sat on an upturned tub, took a stub of red chalk from his pocket and started scrawling on the stone beside him. Ha, he wrote. Then ha again, slanting, then a whole flock of them spilling down the rock as if they were all trying to get out first.

Harry Coates swore at him. Tommy just laughed, and it was a terrible laugh, high and cracked, and it went on until Harry was laughing too, and then the rest of us, because it was ridiculous, grown men howling at a wall in the pitch black with our lungs full of coal. The rescue lads found us by the sound. They said they heard us from the shaft head.

Tommy died the year after, on the surface, of nothing the doctors could name. The lamp-room wall is still standing, and the bat is still on it under three coats of whitewash, and when the sun hits it just so, the red ha-ha-ha shows through like a secret the stone wouldn't keep. I touch it every morning on my way to the baths. It is the only thing down there I have ever been sorry to leave.