Small black ink tattoos of an alien head, a cross, a yin yang and a crescent moon on the fingers of a hand raised in a V sign, with more marks on the wrist.

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Alien, cross, yin yang and moon finger tattoos

Hand · Black and grey · Photo

A hand is raised in a V sign against a dark background, with simple black ink tattoos on the index, middle, ring and little fingers. The designs are an alien head, a cross, a yin yang symbol and a crescent moon, drawn with bold, even outlines and solid black fill. Small black marks and symbols also sit on the wrist, and the ink is the only colour in the image.

Hand Forearm Alien Cross Yin yang Crescent moon Finger tattoo

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The bus shelter on Harbour Street had a crack in its glass shaped like the Isle of Sheppey, and that was where Dilys and I agreed to meet whenever the fish sheds turned us out at midnight. We had a language of our own by then, four signs we'd invented in the back row of Miss Pryce's maths lesson: the grey alien meant come now, the cross meant keep away from the Vicar's boat, the yin and yang meant wait it out, and the moon meant the tide is wrong.

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Nobody else in Ramsgate could read them, which suited us. Dilys worked the packing line at the smokehouse and I ran errands for the harbourmaster, so we watched the same black water from opposite ends of the quay. For a year the signs carried nothing heavier than gossip: who had been seen kissing whom behind the ice house, which gulls had learned to open the bait bins.

Then, one February, I stood on the sea wall with the wind pushing my coat into a sail and saw her hold up the moon across the car park lights. The tide tables in my pocket said high water was an hour early. Nobody had told the lifeboat crew. I ran. By the time I reached the slipway the sheds were already lit and the men were hauling a dinghy up the slope, and Dilys was waving them away with the flat of her palm, fingers spread wide as a sail.

We never did agree on what the cross had been for. She said it meant the Vicar, I said it meant the sea wall, and we both laughed until the bus came. The timetable is still folded in my wallet, soft as cloth, with a tide mark across the February page.