Traditional black and grey tattoo of a crescent moon with a smiling face and a black cat sitting on it, on the upper arm.

Crescent moon and black cat on upper arm

Traditional · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A crescent moon with a stylised face in profile sits on the upper arm, with a black cat perched on its curve and its tail curling below. The linework is bold and clean, with grey shading on the moon and cat to give depth. The tattoo is shown in black and grey against a plain background, with a striped top in the frame.

Traditional Upper arm Moon Crescent moon Face Cat Black cat

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The cat was already sitting on the gallery rail when you climbed up with the paraffin, as if she had been waiting since dusk for the lamp to be lit and had decided the moon could take its turn at watching. Mrs Pryce's cat, the village called her, though Mrs Pryce had been dead four winters and the cat had simply moved up the cliff path to the light, the way cats do when a kitchen goes quiet. Her tail hung down over the iron rail and curled at the tip like a question nobody had bothered to finish.

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Out over Carrick Sound the moon came up thin and low, a bitten crescent with a face in its curve, and it seemed to look at you sideways the way Mrs Pryce used to look at a man who had come to the door about the rent. You trimmed the wick and set the glass back with your gloves on, counting the turns the old clockwork needed before it would run true. The cat did not move. Below, the sea took the rocks one at a time, patient and grey.

Near two in the morning a trawler's lights showed on the horizon, then went out behind Gull Head, and you wrote it in the log in pencil because the ink had frozen in the well. The cat stretched, dropped to the gallery boards and left a grey gull feather on the step, a small gift or a small joke, you could not tell which. You picked it up and tucked it into your breast pocket.

At dawn you wrote the last line: Light lit. Moon up. Cat on watch. Nothing sighted. Then you looked at the moon, still hanging pale over the water, and it looked back, and neither of you said anything about the trawler.