There’s something about a vampire bat that hits three of my favourite nerve endings at once: art, animals and old-school horror. So when #Inktober threw up the prompt Pierce, my pen immediately went for fangs.
This illustration is a straight-up love letter to the weird, the nocturnal and the misunderstood, drawn in pen and ink with no safety net, no undo button, just line, shadow and instinct. A bat, mouth open, fangs bared, not because it’s evil, but because that’s what it’s built to do. Nature doesn’t apologise for its tools. It just uses them.
Are there any activities or hobbies you’ve outgrown or lost interest in over time?
I’d have to say horror movies.
I love horror, but not the modern “how much blood can we spray on the camera” variety. I’m talking about the kind of horror that was actually about story, atmosphere and imagination, the kind where your brain does most of the work. Black and white. Overacted. Shadow-heavy. Mood over gore. Bela Lugosi’s Dracula. The Vampire Bat. The old Frankenstein and Wolf Man films. Those movies had a strange innocence to them, not because the stories were soft, but because they trusted the audience. They didn’t need to shove your face into every wound. They let suspense breathe. They let mystery sit in the room. They let darkness feel poetic instead of being in your face.
Even when colour arrived, the best stuff still played that game. Jaws, all tension, barely any blood. Rear Window, pure suspense, zero gore. That’s my kind of horror. The kind that whispers instead of screams.
Somewhere along the way, maybe around The Exorcist, shock became the currency. Gross-out replaced atmosphere. Subtlety got booted out the back door. There’s a market for everything, sure, but for me, horror stopped being about mystery and started feeling like a competition for who could traumatise the audience hardest. Hard pass.
Then I became a dad, and that shift didn’t just tweak my taste, it rewired it. It’s not that I suddenly think darkness is bad. It’s that I don’t want it living in the house. Not in the stories my kids absorb. Not in the background noise of their nervous systems. Something ancient and protective kicks in, like nope, that stays outside the den.
So instead of watching monsters, I started drawing them. Not the Hollywood kind, the real ones. The weird, wonderful, misunderstood beasts of this planet. The ones that already look like they escaped from a horror movie, but are actually just biology doing its thing. Vampire bats. Yeti crabs. Komodo dragons. Tarantula hawks. Still terrifying. Still fascinating. Still beautiful. Still real.
It’s like I didn’t give up horror, I just composted it and turned it into wonder.
This vampire bat illustration sits right in that transition zone. It’s a bridge between my love of old-school horror and my current obsession with animals, conservation and curiosity. It’s still sharp. Still dark. Still a little unsettling. But it’s also reverent. It’s about respect, not fear.
Because the truth is, nature is metal, but it’s not malicious. And the most interesting stories aren’t about monsters, they’re about perspective.
So yeah, maybe I’ll come back to making darker work someday. I don’t think that door is closed, it’s just not the room I’m living in right now. Right now, I’m raising kids, drawing strange animals and building a world that feels like mystery, not menace. Same fascination. Different lens. And honestly, I think this season is just as powerful, if not more, than anything I could’ve made dripping in fake blood. Because wonder lasts longer than shock.
And this piece isn’t a print. It’s a 20 × 20 cm original illustration, ripped straight from my sketchbook, ink on paper, line by relentless line, no two marks ever to be repeated. Every scratch, shadow and tiny hatch is born from the weird, wild mind behind Uncommon Animals of the Alphabet, creatures most folks have never seen and probably can’t pronounce. This is original art, not a copy, not a mass-produced echo. It’s a one-of-one.
You’re not buying wall decor. You’re pulling a living fragment of imagination off the paper and grounding it into your space. It’s handcrafted chaos and curious beauty, wrapped in the grit of pen and breath. It’s original, hand-drawn by me, 20 × 20 cm, pen and ink on paper, unique 1/1, signed, with a certificate of authenticity included, unframed so you can finish or hang it how you choose.
It’s shipped flat and carefully protected, because I don’t play fast and loose with originals. Once it’s on your wall, it becomes a talisman for curiosity, defiance and weird beauty. It’s the kind of art that doesn’t just sit there, it watches back. Owning this means you’re fuelling ongoing creation, not some sterile assembly line. You’re backing an artist still fighting against the mundane, still obsessing over the uncommon, still pushing ink into territory most minds never wander.
Kids Book Illustrator Andy C Marshall 