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TattooLOG

References, processes and ideas that guide my tattoo work. It’s a space to give context and clarity to the style and the thinking behind the designs.

 

bat in The Art of Falconry

Not a modern bat. Not even a believable one. Its body is off. The limbs stretch like hands. It looks less like something alive and more like something imagined—like it slipped out of a dream and landed on the page.

So, this tattoo has a pretty fascinating backstory. It comes from a 13th-century manuscript called De Arte Venandi cum Avibus, an early falconry guide commissioned by Manfred of Sicily around 1260. This manuscript is like a medieval treasure trove of bird illustrations—over 900 of them, each one incredibly detailed. And then there's this one quirky little bat drawing that doesn’t quite match the rest.

One of the sweetest details is that the bat’s limbs end in these tiny little hands. It's almost like the artist imagined the bat with a bunch of miniature human-like hands at the end of its wings. It’s such a whimsical touch and just shows how imaginative medieval illustrators could be when they were filling in the blanks.

We inked this piece at Visions of Ecstasy Studio here in Berlin. After tattooing it, I found out it’s actually been tattooed by quite a few people before, so it’s not the most original design. But it still has that special charm every time it’s used.

And as a little final note, the client who chose it was visiting from the US and only had about 48 hours in Berlin. She decided to spend part of that whirlwind trip getting this as her very first tattoo before heading back home. It’s a great reminder of how these little pieces of history travel around the world.


Explore the original bat illustration here: https://www.e-codices.unifr.ch/en/bnf/lat7656/283/0/Sequence-1


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jorge cruzComment