Black and grey dotwork and engraved tattoo of a hanging fruit bat with folded wings on a branch with leaves, on the side of the body.

Hanging fruit bat on a leafy branch

Dotwork · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A fruit bat hangs upside down from a curved branch, with its wings folded around its body and its head turned to the lower left. Fine hatching and stippled dots build the shading on the wings, fur and leaves, giving an engraved look. The image is black and grey only, with the leaves trailing to the upper right and the bat filling the lower left of the frame.

Dotwork Botanical Ribs Bat Branch Leaves Fruit

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The boy came down the ladder white to the lips and said the bat in the medlar was not dead, only upside down and very cross about it, and would I come and tell him what to do. Mrs Okonedo had sent him, though she was still at the sink with her sleeves rolled, so it fell to me.

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I took my father's pruning gloves and went out under the glasshouse wall. The medlar leaned over the gravel like a man listening at a keyhole. From its lowest limb hung the bat, folded in its wings like a letter tucked back into its envelope, its head turned towards the potting shed as though it had heard its name. The leaves nearest its face were stripped to their veins. A single fruit, sallow and freckled, dangled by its stalk above its feet. My grandfather engraved birds for a book printed in Edinburgh, and he used to say the secret of a fine line was to let the shadows do the work. I had never thought to apply that to a creature that eats pears.

We did nothing for an hour. Bats, I had decided, were like difficult guests, and you did not shoo them. Mrs Okonedo brought out a bowl of water and a saucer of bruised plums, set them on the wall, and shut the door on us both. The bat watched the sun crawl down the glass. Once it yawned, a pink and absurd thing, and I laughed out loud, and the boy laughed too, and the sound seemed to startle the branch.

At dusk it unfolded itself with a slowness that made my own shoulders ache, dropped, caught the air, and went over the wall towards the river without a sound. In the morning the plums were gone and the saucer was dry. I kept the speckled fruit it had left behind. On the windowsill it softened into something brown and sweet-smelling, and I drew it very small in pen, letting the dark do the work.