Colour and grey tattoo of a haunted Victorian house, bare trees and bats on a upper arm in a neo-trad style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Haunted house and bare tree on upper arm

Neo-trad · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

A large Victorian house with steep gables, a turret and a pointed tower stands at the centre of the design, with a bare tree, bats and a pale moon in a hazy sky behind it. The house is rendered in fine black linework and grey shading, while the sky and surrounding foliage carry soft yellow-green and muted colour washes. The design wraps around the upper arm, with a fence and dark ground filling the lower part of the piece.

Neo-trad Upper arm Bare tree Bat Moon

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Tom, the agent has finally given up on the house at the end of Cinder Lane, so I went up on Sunday with the spare key and a flask of tea, meaning only to look at the garden. The fence is still standing, just, its pickets gone grey and leaning like men waiting for a bus. Mrs Abernethy's rose bed has become a thicket of bramble, but the bare plum tree by the back gate is exactly as you remember it, all elbows and no leaves.

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The bats came out while I was standing under it. Dozens of them, from the gable window of the turret, wheeling against a moon the colour of weak custard. I thought of Father on the porch steps with his pipe, saying the house had been built by a man who wanted the neighbours to know he had money, and the sky to know he had nothing else. I laughed at that once. I stood there in the dusk and found I wasn't laughing now.

Inside, the wallpaper in the front room has peeled into long curls, and someone has left a pair of gardening gloves on the sill, stiff and still shaped like hands. I didn't go up the stairs. I picked up a fistful of dry soil from beside the step, and it was cold, as if the ground under the house had never quite agreed to the summer.

I've enclosed a plum stone from the tree. Plant it at the back of your yard, if you still have one, and tell me in the spring whether anything comes up. I'll be at the house again on Sunday, with a bag for the gloves, if I can bring myself to pick them up. Your loving sister, Margaret.