Before and after photo of a neo-traditional bat tattoo on the shoulder, where a faded grey bat was covered with a bold purple and teal bat with an orange glow.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Purple bat cover-up on shoulder

Neo-trad · Shoulder · Colour · Photo

A split image shows a bat tattoo on the upper back and shoulder. The left panel shows a faded, blurred grey-blue bat, and the right panel shows a newly coloured purple bat with teal wing bones, heavy black-free shading and a bright orange glow behind it. A partial green and teal mandala design sits at the right edge of both panels.

Neo-trad Shoulder Bat Wing Mandala

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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

You reach the chapel at dusk with a lamp in one hand and a pot of paint in the other, because Mrs Vane at the lodge swears the bat above the altar has gone the colour of wet slate, and nobody in Harrowby will pay a painter to finish what the weather started. The stair is damp and the bell rope hangs through the gap in the ceiling like a dropped stitch. Below it the flagstones are scattered with swallow feathers and the pale husks of moths.

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The old bat is barely there. Someone long ago gave it a blue wash and a few ink lines, and the rain has done the rest, so its wings look like a sky seen through milky glass. You scrape a little green crust from the bell rope, grind it with linseed, and set it beside the foxglove violet you pressed in summer. Teal for the bones, purple for the membrane, and where the stripes of the wing fall you lay in a darker plum so the leather seems to fold.

The orange has to come last. You wait while the sun slides toward the broken western window, holding the lamp still until a bar of light falls across the wall and throws a halo behind the bat. Your brush hovers over the plaster, uncertain, then sets down a warm ring of ochre that bleeds at its edges like an ember in tinder.

When you finally climb down, the belfry door has opened and the first bats are pouring out over the courtyard. One of them swerves through the chapel window, circles the altar, and folds its wings into the exact shape you painted. Mrs Vane stands in the nave with her shawl pulled tight and says, to nobody in particular, that the old fellow looks hungry now.