Large realistic grey back tattoo across the upper back, showing bats, a full moon, a gothic castle and a skeletal face, with small red roses.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Gothic full back piece with bats and castle

Realism · Back · Mixed · Photo

A large back piece shows a silhouetted couple under a full moon, bats flying across the top, and a gothic castle and tower on the right. A spiral hill, swirling ornamental bands and a skull-like face sit lower down, with small red roses near the centre. The shading is detailed and mostly grey, with the red accents adding contrast to the composition.

Realism Back Bat Full moon Castle Tower Skull Rose Swirl Tree

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The register at Gullet House has the same two names on it every October, and it has done since before my mother took the lease. Mr and Mrs Lowry, room four, the one with the tower window. They paid in silver and never asked for breakfast before ten. I took them for newlyweds who had never stopped honeymooning, until I found the older ledgers in the cellar, damp at the corners, and the Lowrys were booked in 1911, 1934 and 1952, always in the same neat hand.

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The house sits at the top of the cliff road, where the lane coils up from the harbour like a dropped rope. On the night of the full moon the bats come off the tower in a loose black net and cross the bay, and the couple walk down the spiral path to the shingle with their arms linked. My mother always left the back gate unlocked on those nights. She said the sea needed company. She also said the small red roses by that gate, the ones that flowered out of season, were the only thing on the cliff the wind could not bend.

This October I stayed up in the kitchen with the lamp turned low and the clock ticking over the range, and I waited for them to come back up. They came near three, soaked to the knee. The woman stopped at the bottom step and looked at me through the glass, and she had my mother's face, exactly as it was the year I was born.

I set two cups on the tray without being asked. Her husband took his, and she took hers, and neither of them drank. By morning the register had a new line in my own hand, room four, next October, and two red roses lay on the scrubbed table where the cups had been.