Black and grey dotwork tattoo of a hanging bat flanked by two large flowers and leaves, placed across the chest.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Hanging bat with flowers across chest

Dotwork · Chest · Black and grey · Photo

A bat hangs upside down at the centre of the design, with its wings folded and its head pointing down, flanked by two open flowers with stems and leaves. The bat and flowers are drawn with fine outlines and built up with stippled dotwork shading, with white highlights left in the petals and the bat's chest. The design is entirely in black and grey ink and is centred on the upper torso.

Dotwork Botanical Chest Bat Flower Leaves Stem

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

My grandfather never shot the bats in the damson orchard, though half the valley did. He said they came for the fruit that split on the branch, and that a man who begrudged them a few plums had forgotten what he owed the dark. So every August we walked out at dusk with the ladder and the bucket, and I learned to look up before I looked down.

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The flying foxes hung in the old medlar by the wall, a dozen of them folded like umbrellas somebody had forgotten to shut. Upside down, wings wrapped close, heads turned towards the lane as if listening for their own names. Grandfather would stand beneath them with his cap in his hands and count aloud in Welsh, and each time he reached the number he had lost the year before, he stopped and put the cap back on.

The summer my mother went into the hospital in Hereford, I climbed the medlar alone. I was twelve and far too heavy for the thin branches. A bat dropped from the bough above my face, unfurled, and rose over the bed where the lilies had gone to seed. It did not fly off. It circled once, low, and settled on the wall, and I understood that it was keeping me company, which was ridiculous, and which I believed completely.

We picked the fruit that week, rotten sweet, and filled forty crates. Mother came home in September thinner and quieter, and the first thing she asked was whether the bats were back. I told her they were always back. I told her they would be, as long as somebody left the plums on the branch for them.