Line drawing flash of a yellow crescent moon above a ribbon banner reading Fighting evil by moonlight, with a second banner reading Winning love by daylight, on a pink background.

Crescent moon and banner quote design

Colour · Flash

A hand-drawn design shows a yellow crescent moon with dark outlines sitting above two ribbon banners. The upper banner reads FIGHTING EVIL BY MOONLIGHT and the lower banner reads WINNING LOVE BY DAYLIGHT, both in capital letters. The linework is clean and even, with flat yellow fill and a plain pink background.

Crescent moon Moon Banner Ribbon Quote Text

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

My grandmother kept a sampler above the kitchen sink in Hartlepool, stitched in red thread by a girl who never married and never left the county. It said nothing about God or hearth. It said FIGHTING EVIL BY MOONLIGHT on one ribbon and WINNING LOVE BY DAYLIGHT on the other, and for forty years I took it for a joke about the night shift at the fish factory, where my grandfather worked until his chest gave out.

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The morning of Joanne's wedding, I found the sampler in a cardboard box under the stairs and carried it to the church hall with the bunting still tangled in the van. Joanne was pinning her veil in the vestry mirror, swearing softly at a hairgrip. "What's that?" she said. "Gran's rubbish," I said, and then I read it properly for the first time, thumb on the frayed corner, and saw that the two ribbons were folded over each other like a bow tie.

Joanne had spent three winters on the late shift at the ambulance station, driving through the dark to places nobody wanted to be. Her Dave had sat in the car outside every one of those callouts with the engine running, never once asking her to come home early. The daylight was for ordinary things: a cup of tea, a row about the dishwasher, the bins going out on a Tuesday. I had never thought of marriage as something you did in two halves.

I hung the sampler on the cloakroom hook, where the light from the high window fell on it at noon. When the vicar asked who had brought the frame, Joanne said, "My gran," and nobody in the room needed to know which gran. The moon had gone behind a cloud, but the red thread still showed, bright as the day it was stitched.