Black and grey tattoo across a woman's shoulder and upper back showing a haunted mansion, bare tree, crosses, bats and a moon.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Gothic mansion and graveyard on a shoulder

Shoulder · Black and grey · Photo

A black and grey tattoo spans the shoulder blade and upper back, showing a large gothic mansion on the right, a bare tree on the left, and a graveyard with crosses and headstones along a rise. Bats fly across a pale sky, with a moon near the top, and the shading is soft and smudged. The warm, soft-focus photograph is framed tightly on the shoulder and hair, with the face mostly out of frame.

Shoulder Back Tree Graveyard Cross Bat Moon

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The reunion was held in Hollins House because Mrs Pethick, who ran the old boarding house for forty years, had left the keys to the caretaker's son, and nobody thought to ask what he'd promised in return. We ate vol-au-vents under portraits of headmasters nobody could name, and by nine the tall windows had gone the colour of wet slate.

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Dennis Cole found me at the back door with a bottle of cider he'd smuggled from his car. He was the boy who had dared us all up the attic ladder in the summer of 1994, and he looked pleased with himself for remembering the exact date. Beyond the kitchen garden the churchyard ran up the rise, crosses leaning like tired children, and above the elm the bats were already quartering the sky.

We walked out between the headstones. Dennis said the attic bats were still there, that he'd seen them roosting the year his mother's funeral was held in the chapel, and I didn't ask how he knew they were the same bats. At the top of the rise the house stood black against a moon the size of a dinner plate, every gable dark except one. That one window was ours, the old dormitory at the top of the stairs.

I told him I'd climbed that ladder alone the night he lost his nerve, and carved my initials beside the chimney breast, and never told anyone because nobody had come back to check. Dennis went quiet. Then he laughed and said the attic had been bricked up in 1997, and that if I wanted to see my letters again I'd have to ask the caretaker's son for a torch and a favour he would surely want back. Below us the lights of the hall went out one by one, and the bats poured over the churchyard wall like ink spilled upwards.