Small solid black moon phases tattoo on the forearm of a person in a black knitted scarf and black layered dress.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Black moon phases tattoo on forearm

Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

The photograph shows a small black tattoo of three crescent and circular moon phases on the outer forearm, below the sleeve of a black sheer top. The head is out of frame, cropped by a black knitted scarf, and the rest of the body is covered in layered black clothing against a wooden door. The tattoo is rendered in solid black ink with simple, bold shapes and no visible shading or colour.

Forearm Moon Moon phase Crescent Circle

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The last up goods was late again, so I stood on the platform at Fenny Bridge with the lamp turned low and waited for the rails to start humming. Walter, who had the box before me, swore you could hear a train ten minutes before the lamps caught it, provided the moon was right. He kept a ledger for it, a tally of nights with a little mark in the margin: a crescent for a clear sky, a full circle when the wires sang loudest, and a half-moon, split down the middle, when he had heard nothing at all and simply wanted to be believed.

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I took the ledger over with the keys and the stove that smoked in a south wind. Most entries were in faded pencil, but the last page was in Walter's shaking capitals: NOT MINE TO KEEP. I did not understand that until March, when the signal wire went quiet for three nights running and the moon hung over the water meadows like a thumbprint. On the third night I heard it, faint through the rails, a train that was not on any timetable, moving slowly towards a platform that had been closed since the war.

I did not go out to meet it. I sat with the ledger open and drew the three shapes beside the date, one after another, the way Walter had: crescent, full, and the thin sliver the moon becomes just before it disappears. When I looked up, the platform lamp had gone out on its own, and the sound had turned around and gone back the way it came, leaving only the clean tick of the cooling stove and a page that was, for once, entirely mine.