Black blackwork tattoo of four bats in flight across the top of a foot, with stippled wing detail, above red painted toenails.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Four bats in flight on a foot

Blackwork · Other · Black and grey · Photo

Four solid black bat silhouettes fly diagonally across the top of a bare foot, each at a different size and angle. The wings show fine stippled texture and the bodies are filled in solid black ink. The image is in black and grey tones against the pale skin, with red painted toenails and a dark glossy surface in the background.

Blackwork Other Bat Wing Animal

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The attic bats left at dusk, one after another, through the gap where the slate had lifted over the north gable. Ada had counted them every evening since the autumn gales: four small shapes dropping off the lintel and tilting out over the promenade as if the wind had been waiting for them. Her mother had called them the house's bad debts. Ada called them lodgers, because they paid in droppings and never once complained about the damp.

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On the night of the big blow only three came out. Ada stood at the bottom of the attic stairs with the torch shaking in her hand and listened to the roof tick and groan under the wind. She found the fourth wedged in the eaves above the water tank, one wing folded back like a broken umbrella. She carried it down in a tea towel and laid it in the airing cupboard on a folded blanket, between the warm pipes, and told herself she would look again in the morning.

At first light the cupboard was empty and the blanket was still warm. Ada went up the stairs with her heart thudding and found the three others hanging from the rafters, asleep. Then she heard a sharp little call from the gap in the slates, and the fourth bat came out into the grey morning, its torn wing working hard, and banked away straight over the sea towards the lighthouse on the spit. She watched until it was a speck and then nothing.

She had thought the counting was about bringing them home. Standing in the cold attic, she understood it had only ever been about watching them go. After that she left the skylight propped a finger's width open and kept the kettle on, and each evening she counted them out.