Black silhouette design of six bats flying in a diagonal line on a white background, decreasing in size towards the bottom.

Six bats in a descending flight line

Black and grey · Flash

Six solid black bat silhouettes are arranged in a diagonal line, descending from the upper left to the lower right. The wings are drawn with simple, sharp-edged scalloped outlines and small ears, with no interior linework or shading. The bats shrink in size as the line moves down, against a plain white background.

Bat Silhouette Flight Halloween

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Old Maud Tilley kept the water tank at the crossroads where the Sand Road met the bend to Corrin Wells. Every evening she climbed the ladder to count what came out of the mine adit above the ridge, because her father had counted them before her and he said a count kept the mountain honest.

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That summer the bats came out in a line instead of a cloud. One, then another a stone's throw below it, then smaller ones after, each dropping lower as though the sky were a staircase they took one step at a time. Maud wrote them in the ledger with a pencil stub: six, and the last one no bigger than a thumbprint.

The drover Ned Varley stopped his mule at the tank and asked what the numbers were for. She told him the mountain had owed the town six souls since the flood, and the bats were paying it back in small coin. He laughed, drank his fill, and rode on toward the wells before the light went.

Two nights later Ned's mule came down the Sand Road with its saddle empty. Maud did not go looking. She opened the ledger, wrote six in the column as always, and drew a neat line through the last bat, the one no bigger than a thumbprint, because the mountain had taken its tally and she had no quarrel with the sum.