Colour neo-traditional tattoo of a purple haunted castle, orange moon and bats on a forearm, with a script word along the bottom.

Haunted castle and moon on a forearm

Neo-trad · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A haunted castle with tall purple spires and a glowing lit window fills the design, set against a large orange moon, red clouds and several bats. The linework is bold, with soft blended shading and watercolour-like washes in orange, red, purple and grey. A script word runs along the bottom of the piece on the forearm.

Neo-trad Lettering Forearm Castle Spire Moon Cloud Bat Window Script

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The moon hung low and orange over the car park when I lit the ovens, and the bats were already working the bins, flicking past the security light like someone had torn up a page of music and let it blow away. I have baked in the dark for eleven years. I know the building's sounds before the sky changes: the tick of cooling tins, the hiss of the proving cabinet, the fox that screams behind the skip.

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That morning the castle on Gallow Hill had its window lit again. From the back step you could see it, a small square of amber under the purple spires, which had stood empty since the Pryce family left. Dilys from the newsagent swore a woman lived there now, that she wrote her novels by candlelight and came down for bread at four. Nobody had ever seen her. I put it down to Dilys.

At half four a slip came under the shop door, folded twice, in handwriting like barbed wire: Twelve plain tin loaves and one cob shaped like a moon, delivered before the bell. Underneath, underlined twice: Do not knock. I loaded the van, drove up the wet switchbacks with the wipers going, and set the crates on the iron step. The door opened by itself, just wide enough. Inside there was a smell of ink and wax, and somewhere a pen was scratching.

I was halfway down the hill when the sun cleared the ridge and the castle went flat and grey, nothing but stone and a few sad shutters. On the passenger seat lay a sheet of paper, the back of one of my own bread labels. The moon cob was gone from the crate. In its place was a single page with my name at the top, and a first line that read: The baker was already up, and the bats had not yet gone home.