Black and grey full sleeve tattoo on an arm showing manga-style women, bats, a skull, a checkerboard and an eye in a sunburst.

Black and grey manga-style full sleeve

Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A full sleeve runs from the shoulder towards the wrist, filled with several manga-style women with dark bobbed hair, one seated and one with a skull at the elbow area. Bats, a crescent moon, a checkerboard pattern and a large eye in a radiating sunburst sit among the figures. The work uses fine black linework with solid black areas and soft grey shading against a pale background.

Upper arm Forearm Woman Bat Skull Pentagram Eye Sunburst Crescent moon Sleeve

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Marta had been told the bats would leave the barn once the frost came, but in December they still hung from the rafters like dropped gloves, and every time she lifted the lantern they shifted and sighed. Her father's ewes were lambing early in the cold, and she had the night watch because her brother had a fever and her mother would not let anyone else near the pens.

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Near midnight the lamb came wrong, a tangle of legs. She knelt in the straw with her sleeves rolled and her hands slick, talking the way her grandmother had talked, low and steady, counting under her breath. Above her, on the cracked whitewash of the gable wall, someone had painted a round eye inside a sunburst years before, and the lantern light caught it so that it seemed to open a little wider each time she looked up.

The ewe went quiet at last, the lamb breathing, and Marta sat back against the hurdle to rest. On the floor beside her lay the old chessboard her grandmother used to play against the wind, its squares gone grey. A thin crescent of moonlight came through the slats and lay across the black and white. Her grandmother had always said the moon came down to check on the lambing, and that you must never be the one who blinked first.

She counted the ewes, eleven of them, and the eye above did not blink. When her mother came with the kettle at dawn, Marta was still sitting there, the bats had gone, and the wall was only plaster again, though she noticed the sunburst had kept one ray pointed at her.