Free The Bat Tattoo by Russell Hoban

how he came to take up tattooing.
    ‘My older brother had tattoos,’ he said, ‘and I wanted to get tattooed too but I was only twelve then and I was too young. When I was fifteen I went back and got a tattoo and after that I kept coming in for more until they were sick of the sight of me. They said, “Why don’t you save up and get the tools and learn how to do it yourself?” So I did and it took me five years before I was ready to do it for money.’
    ‘Where did you go to learn it?’ I asked him.
    ‘I just practised on myself and my friends for the first three years.’
    ‘On yourself!’
    ‘Yes. Most tattoo artists have terrible-looking legs because that’s where you practise when you’re learning. You put your leg up on a chair and it’s easy to work on.’
    His arms were illustrated so copiously that the designs merged in a jungle of pattern and colour from which faces, or perhaps not, peeped indistinctly. I followed him into the STRICTLY PRIVATE area and we went into a little fluorescent-lit room that looked very medical: a white enamel instrument table, glass shelving for more instruments and a tall shelf unit for coloured inks. An Anglepoise lamp gave additional light to a towel-covered arm rest; I’d given him a photo of the bowl with my bat a couple of days ago and he’d done an enlarged copy of the bat on tracing paper. Laying the tracing on carbon paper with the carbon side up he’d gone over the outline to prepare the tracing for transfer to my skin.
    He put on latex gloves, sprayed my shoulder with antiseptic liquid, then shaved it, went over it with an alcoholic stick, and applied the transfer. When he lifted the tracing paper there was the dark-blue outline of my bat, about two and a quarter inches from wingtip to wingtip. After a few minutes for drying there was more antiseptic, then Vaseline to lubricate the skin. He prepared the disposable caps for the two inks, a light red and a dark red, and dipped the outlining machine into the dark red. Then I placed my arm on the arm rest, the gleaming little machine buzzingly approached my shoulder, the needle pricked my skin, and the eighteenth-century bat of the Yongzheng period taxied down the runway into thenew century on me. Would it get me off the ground? I was paying for the tattoo but was I a legitimate passenger or a stowaway?
    Before this I hadn’t put my tattoo thoughts into words with any precision; I felt that in being tattooed I was offering myself to some unknown chance of luck; but now it came to me with simple clarity that I just wanted that bat to take me aboard and fly me out of where I was in myself.
    When I’m in a pub with a few drinks in me I can talk more or less freely to strangers but I don’t like to lay out my whole history for everybody and it isn’t easy for me to type it out here. I’ll say what I can and maybe more at another time. At my present age of forty-seven my back story is not an album of happy memories. I was married for seven years; Jennifer died in a car crash in 1995. After that I kept mostly to myself for the next few years: I did some painting and drawing, some reading. I watched a lot of videos, went to museums and concerts, lived from day to day the best I could. I’d nothing much to say to anyone; I got fewer and fewer dinner invitations and became more and more boring to myself. But after a while I was ready to move on to whatever was next and that’s when I decided on a bat tattoo and met Sarah Varley. That encounter at the V & A was the sort of thing that sometimes leads to a closer acquaintance but I didn’t feel like starting with a new person; there was still too much unfinished business in my head.
    Adelbert Delarue was much in my mind of course. He was delighted with the gorilla and particularly with the Bach tape. ‘So austere!’ he wrote. ‘This so noble primate with his grandeur priapic, how he resonates and echoes lost evolutionary memories while the music goes up and down and in