Black and grey tattoo of a bat symbol filled with lace-like patterns and a scalloped edge, shown on the upper arm in a blackwork style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Lace bat symbol tattoo on upper arm

Blackwork · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows a bat symbol outlined with a scalloped, lace-like border, with the wings and centre filled with dense black lace motifs and a diamond-patterned panel. The linework is bold and the black fill is solid, with soft grey tones giving some depth to the centre. The design fills the frame against a close crop of skin, with no colour ink used.

Blackwork Upper arm Bat Lace Diamond pattern

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The Jacquard cards came up from the warehouse in a crate that smelled of tallow and wet wool. Mr Ashby had ordered the diamond chain for the spring veils, not the thing with wings, but Nell pulled the first card under the lamp anyway and found the holes already arranged: wings, a pointed head, a border of scallops like the edge of a doily.

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By the third night the frames at Pilling's were running the pattern without anyone feeding it in. Lace came off the bobbins in black rolls, dense as bruises, and the night foreman stopped counting them. Nell found an old pattern book in the card room drawer, its spine held together with twine, and on the last page someone had pricked the same bat with a pin and written beneath it in brown ink: for Margaret, who would not stop asking.

She took the first roll to the widow's cottage in Lenton, because the veil order had been paid in advance and Mrs Marsh had written three letters demanding it. The door opened before Nell could knock. The widow held the lace to the lamp for a long time and said Margaret had been her younger sister, a frame-worker who died at twenty with a cough, and that she had always wanted something in the mill that could fly out of it.

Nell walked back through the wet streets with the empty spindle in her hands. At the mill gate she looked up at the windows, where the night's lace hung drying on the rails, black wings pinned against the glass, and thought they looked ready to lift.