Black and grey photograph of a flock of solid black bat silhouettes tattooed down the inner forearm, with a hand with dark nail polish visible at the bottom of the frame.

Flock of bats on a forearm

Blackwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A flock of about a dozen bat silhouettes in solid black ink flies up the inner forearm, varying in size from small to large and spread diagonally across the skin. The bats are filled with dense, even black with crisp edges and no shading or fine internal detail. The black and white photograph is taken close up with a dark background, and a hand with dark nail polish appears at the bottom of the frame.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Tom,

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The boats were in by four, but the fog sat on the harbour wall until nearly seven, so I walked down to the slip with Mum's lamp and counted them coming through the gap. Eleven hulls. Dad's Margaret Ann came last, low in the water, and the gulls were going mad over her stern before I could make out her colours.

Then the light went grey and the bats came out of the old salt store, the one with the broken slates. I've never seen so many at once. They poured over the quay in a ragged bunch, split into smaller knots and wheeled up past the chapel, dropping toward the water and hauling themselves back up again, as if they were hunting the nets for something the men had left behind. Mrs Pryce says it means a bad catch. I said it means they're hungry, same as the rest of us.

Dad climbed the slip with his oilskins over one shoulder and stood looking up at them for a long while. He didn't say anything. Then he said, "Count them, Ellie," so I did, and got fourteen. He said that was one more than the year Grandad went out and never came back, so we'd take it.

Come home before the spring tides. The nets need a second pair of hands, and I've been pretending I'm not frightened of the shed loft, where the bats hang in the dark like wet coats.

Love, Ellie

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