Black and grey gothic landscape tattoo across a woman's back, showing a castle, bare trees, bats and an ornate scrolled panel at the base.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Gothic castle and bats across a back

Back · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo covers most of the back and shows a castle on a hill at the left, leafless trees, and bats and birds flying across the upper right. An ornate scrolled panel with a small red accent sits at the lower back. The shading is soft and grey, with the scene fading into light clouds toward the top.

Back Castle Bare tree Bat Bird Landscape Scrollwork Cloud

Find an artist for this

Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The bats came out early at Calder Hill, the way they always did when the bells rang for a wedding. My cousin Edith swore they were the Calder sisters, dead since the Coronation and come down to inspect the bride. We stood on the terrace with our gloves in our hands, watching the black shapes stitch across the sky above the castle while the photographer swore at the fading light.

Keep reading

The castle had been empty for forty years, its windows like pale eyes in the grey stone, and the trees around it had been bare so long that the rooks had stopped pretending to nest there. The groom's grandfather had bought it from the council for a single pound and spent his whole pension on a new roof. He never once asked anyone whether it was a good idea. He liked a thing that stood on a hill and dared you to climb it.

At the reception someone found the old ledger in the cellar, the one with the scrolled gilt cover and a cracked red seal. Inside was a list of every bride who had married into the family, each name ruled through with a date beside it, and the last line was blank. Edith laughed until she had to sit down. The bride didn't laugh. She took the pen from the table, wrote her own name in the empty space, and then, very neatly, drew a small bat in the margin.

Later, when the fiddler had gone home and the candles had guttered down into the curls of the candlesticks, I walked out to the terrace alone. The clouds had thinned. Above the castle, the last bats were still turning, quick and certain, as though they knew the way home better than any of us did.