Pencil sketch of a large-eyed cartoon bat with fluffy fur, surrounded by curling vines and leaves, drawn as a tattoo design in a sketchbook.

Cartoon bat with vine flourishes

Black and grey · Flash

A pencil drawing of a round, wide-eyed cartoon bat with spread wings and fluffy fur, shaded with soft grey tones and dark outlines. Curling vines, leaves and swirling tendrils wrap around the bat on a light paper background. The composition is loose and balanced, with the flourishes filling the upper right and lower areas of the sheet.

Bat Creature Vine Leaves Swirl Flourish

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The bat came to the wall in the month the brambles fell, when the toll-keeper's lamp had gone out and nobody had lit another. He was no bigger than a teacup, with fur like a dandelion clock and eyes so round that the moon looked squinting beside them. Mistress Ada Cobb, who kept the gate between Lower Hallow and the Fenny marshes, said the first owl to see him would have him for supper, so she gave him a crust and a place in the ivy.

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The ivy, being ivy, took a liking to him. By spring it had wound up the gatepost, curled round the toll-board and unrolled tendrils across the yard, with leaves like little spades and buds that opened into something between a bell and a fist. Travellers stopped to stare. A drover paid his toll in coins and was sent on his way with a leaf, and the leaf, pressed into his hat band, turned his cattle home every time he lost the road in fog.

One autumn a man came up the Fenny road with a sack of stolen silver and a face like wet paper. He asked for the gate to be opened without a toll. Ada said the gate asked nothing, but the bat did. It flew down from the vines with its wings spread wide as a barn door and sat on the boundary stone where the two parishes met, and it would not move. The man could not bring himself to step over a creature that looked so sorry for him.

In the morning Ada carried the silver back to the Fenny clerk. The bat was found asleep in the crook of the ivy with a single dew-bright leaf tucked under one wing. The gate has been kept by his kin ever since, or so the drovers say, and no toll has ever been taken from anyone who arrives with a leaf in their hat.