Black and grey tattoo on a shoulder showing a gothic house, bats, a full moon, crosses on a graveyard hill and a bare tree.

Gothic house and graveyard on a shoulder

Shoulder · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo covers the shoulder and upper back with a gothic scene: a tall old house on the left, several bats, a full moon, and small crosses and headstones on a rising hill. A bare tree with thin, sketchy branches sits on the right, and the scene fades into the skin at its edges. The work uses soft grey shading and fine dark linework, with the moon left as an unshaded pale disc against a light background.

Shoulder House Bat Moon Graveyard Cross Tree Hill

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mind the step, it's older than both of us. That was the house on the hill above the mill town, Greave Hall, and the Ashdown brothers lived in it the year the river froze. Nobody in Ferrish went up there after dark, which is why Constance Ashdown went up there every night that winter with a lantern and a tin of mutton broth for the old steward who had stopped answering the bell.

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He was buried in the little walled plot beyond the lych gate, under a cross somebody had cut from a barrel stave. The moon was that bright white you only see over frozen fields, and the bats came out of the chimneys as if they had been waiting for her. She counted them the way her mother counted stitches. Seven, then nine, then none, and when she looked up the tree at the crest of the rise had lost all its leaves in the space of a breath and stood there like a hand held up to stop her.

She told the constable the house had its shutters open. He said they always did. She went back once more, in March, when the thaw had come and the headstones had sunk into the mud, and she found the steward's name had been scratched out and her own written beneath it in a hand she did not recognise. That was the last time anyone saw Constance Ashdown in Ferrish. Her lantern still sits on the sill of the top window, and on a clear night, if you stand at the bottom of the lane and count, you will get to nine bats before you get to ten.