Small solid black bat silhouette blackwork tattoo on the inner forearm, shown in a black and white photo with a soft blurred background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Small bat silhouette on a forearm

Blackwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A small, solid black bat silhouette with wide, scalloped wings sits on the inner forearm. The bat is filled with flat black ink with no visible shading or fine detail, and its edges are crisp. The photograph is black and white, with the skin in soft focus and a blurred background that keeps attention on the tattoo.

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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

No, sit closer, the fire only warms the front of you. Yes, that's the bat on my wrist, and yes, you'll all have one by spring if you pass the tunnel test. Every runner of the Saltmarsh Relay was inked there the day they passed, always the same flat black, because the old needle-woman said a bat wants no shading to be seen in the dark.

Keep reading

The Relay carried mail under the drowned city, down through the flooded sewers to the coast, and those tunnels were black as a cellar's throat. Lamps failed. Runners went blind and walked into the water. So the Guild cut bats from sheet tin and nailed one above every junction. A bat, they said, flies where no light goes and finds its way out by sound. Strange thing to trust, a tin bat on a wall, but trust it they did.

Then came the winter the tin ran out. Hessa Quaile, eleven years a runner, had a satchel of birth-papers for the far pumping station and no lamp that would hold a flame. She walked with one hand on the brick, counting junctions by the cold of the air. At the fourth she found no tin bat, only a scratched mark where one had hung. She stopped, clicked her tongue the way the old men taught, and listened. The echo came back wide and soft from the left, which meant open air, which meant the pumping station.

She got the papers through. Her scratched mark is still on the tunnel walls, and it is what the Guild cut into its first brass tokens. Some of us ink the bat and some of us ink the mark beside it. Mine is the bat. It means fly, and listen first.

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