Black and grey tattoo of a gothic house, bats, a full moon, graveyard crosses and a bare tree across a woman's shoulder and upper back.

Gothic house and graveyard on a shoulder

Shoulder · Black and grey · Photo

A woman with pink hair is shown from behind, her shoulder and upper back covered by a black and grey landscape tattoo. A large gothic house with a tower sits on the left, with bats flying above, a full moon in a cloudy sky, and a graveyard with crosses along a ridge. A bare tree with fine branches rises on the right, and the shading is soft and smudged, with the tattoo fading toward the edges of the frame.

Shoulder House Bat Moon Graveyard Cross Tree Landscape Cloud

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dad had the tarpaulin off the Crake Manor float before the rain reached the ground field, and he was still swearing at the wet ropes when I climbed the tower with a tin of grey and a brush I'd borrowed from the paint van. The house was only plywood and gaffer tape. Every ride night the bats swung on their wires above the roofline, and every ride night some child asked why the moon was a lightbulb. Nobody ever asked me, because I'd painted the moon myself two summers back, in a thin wash that Dad said looked like a bruise on a pear.

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The bulb had gone dark during the afternoon rehearsal, and Mr Ayres from the generator lorry said he wouldn't climb anything in weather like this. So I did. Halfway up the ladder, behind the cardboard headstones, I found a panel nobody had opened in years. On its back was a bare tree, its branches fine as hair, and under the trunk someone had pencilled, Tom, do not sell the moon. The date was 1961.

I sat with that a long while, rain drumming the tin roof, thinking about the showman who must have painted it and the moon he'd kept lit for his boy. Then I changed the bulb, took the grey out along the ridge in my soaking boots, and added three small crosses to the graveyard that nobody would ever count.

When the gates opened at seven, the screaming started on cue and the moon glowed over the headstones as it always had. Dad asked if I'd sorted the light. I said yes, which was true, though it was the tree on the back of that board I kept thinking about all evening.