Realistic portrait tattoo on an upper arm of a long-haired, bearded man grinning with a gold tooth and holding a bat marked montos.

Realistic portrait of a grinning man with a bat

Realism · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

A large portrait tattoo shows a man with shoulder-length hair and a full beard, smiling broadly to show a gold tooth. He holds a bat with the word montos printed along it, with his hand and fist in the lower left corner. The shading is smooth and detailed, built from black and grey with teal and warm skin-toned highlights, and the figure fills the frame.

Realism Upper arm Portrait Man Bat Beard Long hair Hand Text

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You have the bat on the scanner screen before he finishes his grin, a shape of shadow with a fat end and a thin handle, and the word running down its barrel in letters too neat for a joke. Montos. The man at the hatch has shoulder-length hair the colour of wet slate and a gold tooth he shows you like a receipt. Step out of the vehicle, you say, and he does, slowly, with the bat held upright at his shoulder as if he is waiting for a train.

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Under the strip light you turn it over in your gloves. It is pale ash, handled smooth by a thumb that wasn't his, and someone has burned a small house mark into the knob. He says it was his grandfather's, cut by a carpenter called Montos in a village above the river, who made one for every boy who ever swung for the parish side. The customs form asks for a value. You write nothing, because you do not know what a dead man's bat is worth, and because he is still smiling.

You radio the number stamped under the house mark. A woman answers on the fourth ring, her voice thick with sleep and then suddenly clear. Her husband made bats, she says. The last one went over the mountain in a cardboard tube with a boy's name inside it, and she never heard whether it arrived. She asks you to tell her it's still straight. You turn it in the light, and it is, perfectly, so you tell her so.

When you hand it back through the gap, he takes it by the handle, not the barrel, the way his grandfather would have wanted. You stamp the form, nothing to declare, and watch the taillights climb the hill, the word still pale on the bat's flank long after the dark has swallowed the rest.