Back of a woman's upper spine with a black abstract brushstroke tattoo containing a crescent and dots, softened by pink, purple and blue watercolour splashes.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Abstract brushstroke and crescent on upper back

Back · Mixed · Photo

A person is photographed from behind, showing the upper back and the back of the head, with the face not visible. A tall, tapering black brushstroke runs down the centre of the upper back, with a crescent arc, small dots and thin curved strokes near the top. Soft pink, purple and blue washes spread behind the black linework, and the painted wall behind the subject adds further colour.

Back Brushstroke Crescent Moon Dot Spine

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The brush had belonged to my aunt Odile, and she kept it wrapped in oiled paper for thirty years because she said a brush left to dry forgets how to lift. I took it down the morning the last boats were tied up at Scarrow Quay, dipped it in the bottle of lamp black by the window, and told myself it was only a job for the chandlery.

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Mr Halse, who had painted every board in the harbour for forty years, had left a commission on the trestle: a long plank reading TIDES POSTED WITHIN, with a crescent for the spring moon. My hand shook over the wet wash. Odile's voice came to me then, as dry as her brushes. Don't draw the moon. Let it happen beside the line. So I laid one stroke from the top of the board to the bottom, pressing hard at the crown and lifting as it fell, until it thinned to a hair. The crescent came off the bristles almost by accident, a curve with a drop of ink beaded at its tip, and a little spray of dots where the brush had flicked against the rim of the water jar.

The wash behind it was pink from the madder and blue from the indigo, and it bled outward into the grain while I worked. When Nell from the chandlery came in out of the rain she stood over the plank for a long time. You've got it running the wrong way, she said. Ebb always runs out, not in. I looked, and she was right, the stroke was a tide going down the board like water off a slipway. I did not repaint it. I told her the sea did not mind which way a line was going, and she laughed, paid me in a tin of Assam, and asked me to leave it that way.

At dusk I rinsed the brush under the tap until the water ran clear, though a grey thread of ink still lived in the belly of the hair. The moon I had left wet on the board had dried to the same pale shape as the sky over the breakwater, and I could no longer tell which of them had come first.