Fine line black outline of a bat symbol tattooed on the inner wrist of a palm-up hand, against a black and white striped background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Small bat outline on the inner wrist

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A small outline tattoo of a bat symbol sits on the inner wrist, shown with the palm facing up. The linework is thin and even in a single dark ink, with the wings and scalloped edges drawn as an open outline with no shading or fill. The background is a black and white striped fabric, and the tattoo is the only colour-neutral focal point in the frame.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Don't you look at me like that, Tom Rowe, I haven't finished. Pass the pot and keep your hands off the biscuits. So the Brightwater came in off the Hake Bank with her engine coughing and the fog lying on the water like wet wool. Nobody could see her bows. Nan Pascoe stood on the quay with her lamp, same as she had every night since her husband went down, and she knew the boat by her sound alone.

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The Brightwater had a bat painted on her wheelhouse that spring, and the men had laughed at it. Nan's girl Bet had done it with a fine brush and black enamel, only the outline and no fill, the wings scalloped like the edges of the sea caves. Bet said a bat is only its edges in the dark, and you can make out the shape long after the middle has gone. The crew called it a daft lark. Then a bat came out of the cliff at dusk and settled on the bow rail, folded up tight, and the skipper took it for an omen and never let anyone paint over it.

That night the fog closed like a fist. The Brightwater's own lamp was no use to anyone, but Nan had lit a second one at the end of the slip and swung it slow, and the black outline on the wheelhouse caught the glow and threw a dark shape across the water. The skipper steered on that shape, wings wide, all the way past the Stacks and into the harbour mouth, where the rocks run out like teeth.

At first light they found the boat tied up, every man aboard, and Nan asleep in a chair on the quay with the lamp gone cold in her lap. Bet took a wet cloth to the wheelhouse to rub the paint off, and it would not come. Every boat built in Porthgwidden since has a bat on her bow, and nobody there has ever thought to ask why.

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