Black blackwork tattoo of four bats with web-patterned wings, arranged in a diagonal line across the top of a foot.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Four bats with web wings across a foot

Blackwork · Other · Black and grey · Photo

Four bats are arranged in a diagonal line across the top of a foot, each with outstretched wings filled with a web-like pattern. The bodies and wing outlines are bold black linework with solid black areas. The image shows only black ink on pale skin, with the bats angled to suggest movement from the ankle towards the toes.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You learn the bats by their wings before you learn anything else, because at dusk over Pellow Quay the webbing catches the last of the light and makes them look stitched from old net. Your uncle Dafydd says they roost in the tithe barn behind the chandlery and leave together every evening, four of them, like a crew going on watch.

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The summer you turn eleven, you decide to follow them. You take a jam jar, a torch with no batteries and the gaff hook from your grandmother's crab boat. The lane runs down past the net lofts, where men sit mending mesh with needles of bone-white twine, and it strikes you that the bats are doing the same work, threading the gap between the harbour wall and the sky.

They do not head out to sea. They follow the wall, dipping towards the slipway where the tide is turning, and at the last mooring post they drop one after another into the black water under the pontoon. You wait on the cold stone until your fingers ache. When a lantern swings across the slip, you see a snarl of wet netting caught on the pilings, and one of the bats hanging in it, its wings spread in a perfect fan.

You do not free it. You lower the jam jar and kneel there while the tide climbs the steps, and you learn how quickly a thing can stop fighting a net. The other three circle once above you, then drift home without it. By morning the net has been cut loose and the bat is gone, and you still have not told anyone what you saw.

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