Close-up of a realistic black and grey tattoo of a bat with large dark eyes peeking out from its folded wing membrane.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Realistic bat peeking from folded wings

Realism · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows a bat's face with large, glossy eyes, partly wrapped in its dark wing membrane. The shading is smooth and soft, with strong contrast between the near-black head and the lighter grey folds of the wing. The bat fills most of the frame, and the surrounding skin is visible only at the edges.

Realism Bat Wing Eye

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The bats came to the north cloister every October, when the apples in the orchard had gone soft and the brothers had stopped expecting visitors. Brother Anselm kept the lamp in the scriptorium and had never once been startled by them, which was why he was the one sent to deal with the animal tangled in the drying linen on the Tuesday.

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It was no bigger than his palm, folded up in a fist of wet wool, and it looked at him with eyes so round and wet that he forgot the lamp was going out. He had read that bats could not be kept by hand for long without dying of fright, so he carried it to the scriptorium with his sleeves rolled and set it on a sheet of vellum that had been spoiled by a careless ink pot. The creature shuffled its wings tight across its face, peeked out at him through the gap, and then drew the membrane back again, as if it were the one deciding whether to trust him.

Prior Edmund found them at matins, Anselm still crouched over the desk with a bowl of water and a candle burned to its socket. He expected a scolding about the vellum. Instead he knelt, looked for a long moment, and said only that the Lord had made stranger things to keep watch in the dark. In the morning the bat was gone, and the window of the north cloister stood open to the orchard.

Anselm kept the spoiled sheet. On it, in the faint brown ghost of the spilt ink, he could still make out a small shape with its wings wrapped round it, watching him as if he had only just let go.