Colour tattoo of a haunted mansion under a stormy night sky with bats and a raven on a weathervane, in a realistic painterly style on the upper arm and shoulder.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Haunted mansion scene on upper arm

Realism · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A large scene shows a Victorian-style mansion with a cupola, dormer windows and a wrought iron gate in the foreground, set among overgrown trees. Bats and a raven perched on a weathervane fly across a cloudy blue night sky above the building. Soft shading and blended teal, green and blue tones give the house a misty, moody look, and the scene wraps around the arm.

Realism Upper arm Shoulder Bat Raven Tree Cloud Night sky

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, the lot of you, because the raven doesn't like a gap in the circle. No, don't look at the gate yet. Gate first, then the house. That's the proper order, and anyone who looks up at the bats before they've earned it gets their supper stolen.

Keep reading

The house was called Harrowgate Hall and it stood on Mistral Ridge when Ceres Colony was still a row of pressure domes. Nobody built it. It grew, the old engineers said, out of the ridge's own dust, and by the hundred-and-fourth year the cupola was already up there with a copper raven on its spire, turning to face whichever way the wind meant to blow the next storm.

Old Mrs Quell kept the gate. Every evening she climbed up with a key the length of her forearm and locked the iron bars, and every evening the bats came off the ridge in a black spill and circled the chimneys, counting. One night in the dust-storm year, a survey boy called Tobiah Vane came up late, climbed the fence where the bars had rusted through, and went inside to find the house had three more floors than the blueprints allowed.

He came out at dawn with nothing in his pockets but a brass weathervane key. Mrs Quell asked him what he'd seen. He said the rooms were full of people waiting to be let out, and that the raven had turned its head and asked him the time. He told it he'd said it was late. The raven nodded, and turned to face the storm. And that, children, is why the gate is always locked from the inside.