Colour neo-traditional tattoo of a haunted house under a purple sky with bats and bare trees, covering the upper arm and shoulder.

Haunted house and bats on upper arm

Neo-trad · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

A large Victorian-style house with a turret, gabled roof and glowing orange windows sits at the centre of the design, framed by bare trees and a flock of bats. The sky behind is shaded in purple and pink clouds, with bold black outlines and soft blended shading on the house and ground. Warm orange and yellow tones contrast with the purple sky, and the design wraps across the upper arm and onto the shoulder.

Neo-trad Upper arm Shoulder Bat Bare tree Cloud Sky Window Path

Find an artist for this

Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The old Crane house stood on the rise above Hollin Pit, with its turret and its black gables, and nobody in Hollin had lived in it since the owner's son went down the shaft in the winter of the big fall. Every evening its windows lit up orange, though there was nobody to light them. My grandmother said the lamps were the dead checking the cages came up on time.

Keep reading

Tom Ackroyd was nineteen and owed his father's debts, so when the colliery manager offered a shilling a night to sit in the parlour and report what the lamps did, he took it. He walked up the path at dusk with a tin of tea and a pocket watch. The bats poured out of the chimney in a ragged cloud against the purple sky, and the bare trees on either side bent their arms toward him like men at the lift gates.

Inside, the parlour was swept and cold. The lamps burned in every window at once, though their wicks were dry. At midnight the bell in the pit yard rang, the way it rang for a missed shift, and one by one the lamps went out except the one in the turret. Tom climbed the stairs. A man sat at a table counting tallies on a board, and he looked up and said, "Ah, you're the new one. Mind the seventh step, it's loose." Tom asked who he was. "Night overman. Same as you, lad. Somebody has to see the cages come up."

Tom went down at dawn and told the manager the lamps were fine. The manager wrote it in his book. The next night Tom went up again with his tin, and the lamps were lit, and he took the seventh step carefully. He poured two cups and left the second one standing on the table, the way his mother used to leave a plate for a man who was late off shift.