Black and grey blackwork tattoo on an upper arm showing a castle held in two hands, with a crescent moon, stars and a hand above.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Castle, crescent moon and hands on upper arm

Blackwork · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A tower-like castle rises through the centre of the design, supported by a hand below and with a second hand reaching down from the top. A crescent moon with a carved-looking face hangs from the upper hand, and small stars and dotted arcs fill the space around it. The engraved-style hatching and cross-hatching are rendered in black ink and grey tones on a wide upper arm, with the composition running vertically along the limb.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The trough had frozen over again, so I was stamping on the ice with my heel when Gran came across the yard carrying the moon. She held it by a length of baling wire, the way you'd carry a lantern, and it knocked against her knee with each step. It was the old brass shade from the parlour, the one with a face scratched into it by somebody's boy a long time back, and she had dug it out of the loft before it was light.

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She wanted a castle on the top field, where the wind had laid the barley flat. For three days she carried every loose stone the November gale had brought down from the wall, and she built them up one course at a time, choosing each for its face the way other women choose eggs. By Thursday it stood taller than me, with arched doors I could have walked through and a crooked turret the ewes kept rubbing against. Dad came up on the tractor and said it would be down by morning. Gran said a thing like that wants a hand under it and another hand above to hang the light from, and she didn't say whose hands they were.

At dusk she tied the wire to the top of the ash tree and let the moon swing out over the castle while I held the lantern. The frost had come down thick and the stars were out in lines across the sky, so she told me to count them, and I got to forty before I lost my place. Then she lit a candle inside the lowest arch, and the moon-face caught the glow and looked straight down at us.

Dad stopped the tractor at the gate and got out to look. Nobody said anything for a while. Then Gran wiped her hands on her coat and said the cows could have a look at it in the morning, because there was no point building a thing like that if nobody was going to stand and stare.

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