bat in The Art of Falconry
This one was for @darkage.online—tattooed right at the center of the chest.
A bat from a 13th-century manuscript. Not a modern bat, not even an accurate one. Its body is off, its limbs look like hands, and it feels more like something from a dream than a field study. I’ve seen this image used before in tattoos—it’s definitely not obscure—but it still felt special to work with. There’s something about it that stays with you. It’s not correct, but it’s unforgettable.
The drawing comes from De Arte Venandi cum Avibus, a Latin manuscript on falconry commissioned by Manfred around 1260. The book is full of detailed, precise bird studies—over 900 of them—most of them caught mid-flight or mid-hunt, almost scientific in their accuracy. And then suddenly, there’s this bat. Out of place. Maybe it came from myth. Maybe no one had seen one closely enough to get it right. Either way, it says something about how the unknown was handled back then—through imagination more than observation.
It’s that mismatch I keep coming back to. That space where things don’t fit, but still matter. Where strangeness gets preserved instead of corrected.
Jorge