Black and purple watercolour tattoo of a bare tree, crescent moon and stippled mountains, with ink splatter, on a limb.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Bare tree and crescent moon with watercolour sky

Blackwork · Other · Mixed · Photo

A bare tree with thin black branches stands in the centre, beside a large crescent moon at the top. Below the branches, stippled dotwork hills and a tiny sun sit inside a black ring, with ink splatter scattered around. Solid black linework and dotted shading contrast with soft blue and violet watercolour washes that fill the sky behind the moon.

Blackwork Dotwork Other Tree Crescent moon Mountain Cloud Sun Ink splatter Night sky

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Fourth night running the moon has come up over the Hollin cutting like a paring knife somebody forgot to wash. Mr Abernethy says it is only the moon and I am to stop writing about it in the signal book, but the signal book is the only place in this halt where anybody reads what I put down, so it will have to take the moon.

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The ash tree by the level crossing has gone entirely bare now. Its branches come down over the wire like the fingers of a hand that has given up holding on. Last Thursday I walked out to it with the lamp to see whether the frost had got into the bark, and I found a spatter of black ink on the gate post where someone had flicked a brush, or where the wind had been painting. I put my palm to it. It was dry and cold and smelled of tar.

Beyond the cutting the hills go up in those dotted stipples, the grey of old pennies, and a sun no bigger than a shilling sits low above them each morning when the train from Carlisle comes through. Nobody gets off here. Nobody has got off since the mill shut. Still I write down the times, because the times are what keep the line honest.

Tuesday a girl in a green coat stepped down from the last carriage, looked at the tree, and asked me which way the moon would be at midnight. I told her south, over the ridge. She said that was not what the old map showed, and I said the old map was drawn by men who had never stood on this platform in January. She laughed and got back on before the doors closed. I have written her down as a passenger, though I do not know her name, and I have decided the moon will be south of the ridge tonight whatever the map says.