Pastel illustration of a fluffy-headed bat hanging upside down, with a blue ribbon reading EVERYTHING and WILL BE OKAY, shown as a flash design with no body placement.

Upside-down bat with Everything will be okay ribbon

Colour · Flash

A bat hangs upside down with its wings folded around its body and a fluffy white head with large dark eyes. A blue ribbon curls around the bat, with the words EVERYTHING across the top and WILL BE OKAY along the bottom in red capitals. The drawing uses soft, sketchy linework with peach, teal and cream washes and no shading beyond light colour blending.

Bat Ribbon Banner Text Wing

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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

The bat had lived in the rafters of the Lantern Hall since before the fiddlers came, and the people of Coldharbour had long since stopped sweeping under it. It hung by its feet from the king-post, wings folded round its body like a shawl pulled tight against the draught, and its head was a soft white curl that the dust settled on. When the band struck up on a Saturday it opened one dark eye and watched the floor.

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Nobody could say where the ribbon came from. One evening it was simply there, blue as a jay's back, looped twice round the bat's middle and trailing down past the lamps. The words on it ran in red capitals, EVERYTHING along the top and WILL BE OKAY along the bottom, and most of Coldharbour could read them. Mrs Pryce, who kept the cloakroom and had buried two husbands and a daughter, said it had been there in her mother's time and would be there after hers, and that the bat had never once let it fall on anyone who did not need it.

Tomas Quill came to the hall in the autumn with his father's boots on the wrong feet and a face like a shut door. He had not spoken since the pit gate closed. He stood at the edge of the boards while the reel went round, and the bat unfolded one wing, slow as a page turning, and let the ribbon slide down until its end hung at the boy's shoulder.

Tomas took hold of it. Nobody heard him say a word. He danced the last reel with Mrs Pryce's granddaughter, clumsy and grinning, and when the lamps were out the bat had folded itself up again, and the ribbon hung over the empty floor, blue and plain, saying what it had always said.