Black and grey tattoo of a haunted house, full moon, bats and a bare tree on a woman's shoulder and upper back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Haunted house and graveyard on a shoulder

Shoulder · Black and grey · Photo

A tattoo across the shoulder and upper back shows a multi-storey haunted house on the left, with bats in the sky, a full moon behind clouds, and crosses and gravestones on a hill. A bare tree with fine branches sits on the right. The work uses soft grey shading and fine linework, with no colour ink. The photo is a close, softly lit crop of the shoulder with the subject's pink hair and lips at the top of the frame.

Shoulder Moon Bat Graveyard Cross Tree Cloud

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The last bus had dropped you at the cattle grid an hour ago, and the driver had not waited to see which way you went. Above Scar Col the cloud was thinning, and the full moon hung behind it like a coin someone had forgotten to pocket. You followed the wall north, boots slipping on wet slate, until the road gave up and a track began, and the track led you to a house you had never been told about.

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Thornmoor House stood on the shoulder of the hill with more storeys than it had any right to, six by your count, each window dark except one at the top. Bats lifted off the roofline when you passed the iron gate, or perhaps they were crows, and in the moonlight it was hard to tell. Beyond the gate the graveyard ran down the slope in a stagger of crosses and leaning stones, and a single bare ash reached over the wall with branches as fine as pen strokes. Someone had cut a path through the nettles to the front door. The path had been swept.

The door opened before you knocked. A woman in a grey coat held out a ledger, open to a page with your name already written in brown ink, and beside it the date of your birth, which you had never told anyone up here. 'You're late,' she said, not unkindly. 'The others have started on the scones.'

You looked back down the track. The valley lights had gone out, one farm at a time, and the moon had slid clear of the clouds to show you the way down, a long pale road that ran straight through the graves to the cattle grid. You took off your wet coat and stepped inside, because the road, you realised, was only ever going to lead one way.