Black and grey tattoo of a full moon with wispy clouds and a flock of black bats on the upper arm, in a blackwork style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Bats flying past a moon on the upper arm

Blackwork · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows a large full moon outlined in soft grey shading, with thin wisps of cloud drifting across it. A flock of solid black bat silhouettes flies diagonally from the moon down towards the lower edge of the arm. The piece is shaded in black and grey only, with the bats in bold dark fill and the moon and clouds in smoother grey gradients.

Blackwork Upper arm Moon Bat Cloud

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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

Right, sit down, the lot of you, the urn's only just boiled and I'm not telling this twice. You all remember Miss Pardoe's classroom, the one with the radiator that knocked. Well, the moon over Oldbury Fold that autumn had gone thin as a communion wafer, and nobody in the village could say why.

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It was Dennis Coyle who did it, the lad who sold conkers by the gram. He climbed the chapel tower with a sack and a pair of shears, meaning to cut a slice off for his mother's pie crust, and the cloud came off the moon like wet linen. Out of the grey poured bats, hundreds of them, black as burnt paper, and they went tumbling down over the rooftops towards the canal, wings clicking like a clock with no hour on it.

Now here is the part Dennis never told. Each bat that left took a little light with it, folded up in its wings, and that's why the moon looks so pale with the smoke still curling round it. Some of them never made the water. They're still on the cobbles down by the lock, look, if you know where to stand. You can count them if you like. Seven, Mrs Hadley says, though she's never managed past six since the sherry.

Dennis came down the tower at dawn with an empty sack and his hair gone white at the temples. He went off to Australia and never came back, and the moon has been full every month since, round and bright and missing nothing, which is the proper penance for a boy with shears. Pass the biscuits, Janet. Nobody leaves until the bats are home.