Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Tribal bat design

Black and grey · Flash

A tribal-style bat with outstretched, spiked wings, curling swirl patterns and a horned head at the top. The design is built from solid black shapes and tapering lines with no shading. It is centred on a plain white background with no body part visible.

Bat Tribal Wing Swirl Horn

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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

Dear Nell, you will not believe what came up the gangway in the lemon crate at Lisbon. Not a stowaway, though Cook Haddon swears it is one. A bat, no bigger than a fist, folded in the straw like a burnt glove. I put it in the scullery bucket and it climbed out with its wings open, black as the soot on the range, and hooked itself to the beam above the bread tins as if it had been paying rent there for years.

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The men have taken to calling it the Admiral, for the two curled horns on its head and the way it ruffles whenever the bo'sun shouts. Its wings have points like the scalloped edge of a pie crust, and the markings on them run in spirals, the same whorls Mr Tully scratches into the tallow when he is bored of the crossword. Nobody has dared shoo it. Cook says a bat in a galley means the bread will rise, and the bread has risen beautifully since Tuesday.

Last night I found the lamp still burning and the flour tin lid bent askew. Tully swore he had nothing to do with it, and for once I believed him, because he was asleep on the coal sacks with his mouth open. I sat up with the lamp and watched the Admiral drop from the beam, circle the stove once, and settle again over the loaves. It had been keeping watch. I was too quick to think of vermin.

I have decided to leave the scullery door open a crack. If the Admiral wants to stand guard while the rest of us sleep, the least I can do is leave it a way out. Write soon, and tell Father the porridge here is better than his. Your loving sister, Ada.