Black and grey dotwork tattoo of an upside-down bat with folded wings on a forearm, beside a denim jacket sleeve.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Upside-down bat on a forearm

Dotwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A bat hangs upside down with its wings folded around its body, its face and ears shown in close detail. The wing membranes are built from fine hatched linework, while the body and face are softened with stippled dots for shading. The design is in black and grey ink and fills the frame against a plain skin tone, with a denim sleeve and a shoji-style screen in the background.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You'll want to know why the Mary Ellen never sailed on a Friday after the winter the bat came aboard. Sit yourself down, the stove's still warm. It came in through the wheelhouse vent in the dark before the lamps were lit, and nobody saw it land. Old Tobias Pengelly found it hanging from the cross-beam of the net drying rack, folded up tight like a wet sail, its ears turned our way as if it was listening for the sea.

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We called it Sexton, because it kept a churchman's hours, out at dusk and back at first light, never a sound. The skipper wouldn't have it touched. A thing that hangs head down, he said, knows the weight of the world better than we do, and he'd sooner trust a creature that finds its shoals in the dark. Each night it slipped over the harbour wall after the moths, and each morning Ada Cundy swept the moth dust off the boards and said nothing about it.

The autumn the Girl Jean went missing off the Lizard, the rack stood empty. Ada sat up three nights with the lamp lit and the door ajar. On the fourth morning it dropped out of the rafters at her feet, grey with dust, climbed onto her sleeve with its thumbs, and hung from the crook of her elbow, quiet, while the boats came round the headland one by one.

So when you ask me whether it was luck, I'll say the boat came home because the bat came home first, and that's the only sermon I've got. Hang your coat the right way up, my love, and mind the stove.

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