Black and grey tattoo with orange and yellow accents of a haunted Victorian house, bats and a full moon, with a wrought iron gate, on a person's calf.

Haunted house and bats on a calf

Calf · Mixed · Photo

A large tattoo covers the calf and shows a Victorian house with a tower, lit yellow windows and a wrought iron gate in the foreground. Bats fly across a large orange moon, and a black bat silhouette sits above, with swirling smoke or cloud shapes filling the background. The shading is soft and detailed, mostly in greys and black, with the orange moon and yellow windows as the main colour accents.

Calf Bat Moon Cloud Tower Window

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The gate at Greywater House had not been opened since the Harcourt sisters died, and Tom Pell had to lean his shoulder into it before the hinges gave. Behind him the lane was already dark. Ahead, the moon hung low and orange over the chimneys, and the house sat beneath it like something that had been waiting for a visitor with a clipboard.

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Inside, the stairs smelled of cold ash and wet paper. He worked through the rooms with his torch, counting joists and tapping plaster for damp, and now and then a bat dropped from the rafters and wheeled off through the broken landing window. In the tower, three tall windows were already lit yellow, though the wires had been cut in 1961 and the council had written that down twice. He pulled out his tape to measure the room. It read eleven feet every time, whichever wall he started from.

On the sill lay a ledger bound in green cloth. The early pages were the Harcourts' household accounts: coal, candles, a gardener named Joseph paid in pennies. Further on, in hands that changed from one line to the next, were other names. A land agent in 1888. A clergyman. A boy from the rates office. Each had a date and a single line beside it. The last entry was dated tomorrow and read simply: Pell, surveyor, measuring.

He sat on the sill with the book on his knees and wrote his report anyway, because it was what he was paid for. Structurally sound. Recommend the house be kept as found. When he looked up, the windows were brighter and the moon had climbed clear of the chimneys. He closed the ledger, left the pen beside it, and walked down through the garden without looking back. Behind him the gate swung shut, slow and careful, the way you close a door on someone sleeping.