Black blackwork tattoo of a winged creature with dripping ink and splatter marks across the forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Dripping winged creature on a forearm

Blackwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows a symmetrical, bat-like creature with outstretched wings and a dark central body. The wings and body are rendered in bold black ink with ragged, dripping edges and scattered splatter marks around the design. The photograph is taken at close range with warm lighting, and the design fills the middle of the forearm against a plain background.

Blackwork Forearm Bat Wing Creature Drip Splatter Ink

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The ink went bad the winter the bats came down to the mill. Old Marjorie Penhale, who kept the parish register at Thornly, had mixed her oak-gall black the way her mother had, and it thickened in the pot overnight and would not run clean from the quill. Every page she wrote looked as if something had dragged wet wings across it.

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The children said the wood had sent it. Ash Hollow ran close behind the churchyard, and on the first hard frost a thing with a man's face and a span of wing like a torn sheet was seen sitting on the lych gate, dripping onto the stones. Where each drop fell, the moss turned black and stayed that way. Marjorie did not hold with such tales, so she took a lantern and a jar of lamp oil and went out to see for herself.

She found it hanging from the hollow oak, wings spread like a page half blotted, and it did not fly at her. It only looked at her and let the ink run from its shoulders in long slow strings. "You've been spoiling my register," she said. It made a small sound, like a pen being set down on a desk. She understood then that it had come to be written into the parish, not to write, and that Thornly would keep whatever it was given.

She went home and fetched the register, and in the morning every name in the book had a small black drip beside it, like a seal. By Lady Day the ink ran true again. Every spring after, one drop fell from the hollow oak onto the first page of the new book, and nobody in Thornly ever asked whose name it was for.