Black ink tattoo of four bats with spiderweb-patterned wings in a diagonal row across the top of a foot.

Four bats in flight across a foot

Other · Black and grey · Photo

Four bat silhouettes with webbed wings, each filled with a spiderweb pattern, flutter in a diagonal line from the ball of the foot towards the ankle. The bats are outlined in black ink with solid dark shading on their bodies and the wing webbing rendered in fine lines. The image is a warm-toned close photograph of the foot resting on a dark surface, with the tattoo as the clear focus.

Other Bat Spiderweb Wing Foot

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The bats left the church tower at dusk, four of them, always in the same ragged line, and Ada Pryce counted them the way she counted bobbins. Win had been at the pillow three weeks and still held her threads too tight. "They're only mice with ideas," Ada said, when the girl stopped to watch them cross the lane above the drying frames.

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That spring the moths had got into the wool store and eaten their way through a whole consignment bound for Exeter. Ada had tried camphor, then tar, then a pair of cats borrowed from the Hallets, and the moths had laughed at all of it. It was the bats, the old sexton said, who put a stop to it in the end, swooping the store's open window every night until the moths gave up. Nobody in Honiton could say whether the bats had come for the moths or the moths for the bats.

Win drew the wings on the back of a pricing slip one wet afternoon. She had the webbing right, fine as a Honiton ground, each bay filled with its own small net. Ada looked at it a long time and said the bat made its lace the same way a spider did, out of nothing but patience and the right tension.

The Hallett christening veil went to the font that Sunday with a border of those wings worked into the hem. Afterwards, as the family came out past the lych-gate, four small shapes lifted from the belfry and came down the lane in their line, folding their lace wings as they landed on the gatepost. The sexton, who had never once been lost for words, said nothing at all.