Black silhouette tattoo of a flock of bats across the upper back and shoulder blade of a woman wearing a purple macrame top.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Flock of bats on upper back

Back · Black and grey · Photo

A woman is photographed from behind, showing a flock of black bat silhouettes tattooed across her upper back near the shoulder blade. The bats vary in size and angle, with smaller ones trailing off downwards, and the solid black ink has crisp edges. The background shows a swimming pool and a grassy garden, with the top's macrame straps framing the design.

Back Bat Flock Silhouette

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You learn the bats of Porthmellin by counting them, the way your grandmother taught you to count gulls before a squall. At dusk they lift from the roof of the old chandlery and scatter over the harbour wall, a loose black handful thrown against the sky. Nobody on the quay looks up any more. You do, because the boats are still out and the tide is turning, and because you promised Tom Harrow you would be on the slipway when his lamp came round the point.

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The lamp does not come. What comes instead is the flock, lower than usual, wheeling over the mooring buoys before dropping in a ragged line towards the water, as though they had seen something moving beneath it. Old Mrs Pascoe, who sells eels from a barrow by the fish market, says it is a sign of a wreck. You say nothing. You have heard her say the same about every wind since the winter the lifeboat was lost.

You wade out to the third buoy, where the rope has fouled and the bats are thickest, and you cut it with the knife your father left you. The smallest bat settles on your sleeve, light as a folded letter, then lets go and follows the rest back up towards the tower in an arrow you can still see long after the water has cooled your wrists.

Tom's lamp appears at last, slow and yellow, rounding the point. The boat comes in on the flood with a full hold and a crew shouting for ropes, and nobody thinks to ask why the harbour wall is dotted with wings. You tell him the bats came first. He laughs and calls it superstition, and you let him, because it is easier to be the one who was right about the weather than the one who was waiting.