Black and grey fine line tattoo on an upper arm, showing a crescent moon, scattered dotted stars and contour-line mountains inside a bold brushstroke circle.

Crescent moon and contour mountains in a circle

Fine line · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A crescent moon sits above layered contour-line mountains, with small stars scattered in the sky above them. The thin, precise linework contrasts with a thick, tapered black brushstroke that forms the outer circle, and soft stippled shading fills the stars and sky. The design is set in black ink and greys, centred on the upper arm with plain skin around it.

Fine line Dotwork Upper arm Moon Crescent moon Star Mountain Circle Night sky

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit where I can see your face, and mind the cup, it's hot. Nobody on the fourteenth floor saw the moon properly after the lift broke in the winter of seventy-one. You leaned out of the kitchen window and got a sliver over the car park, like someone had nicked a bite from a digestive.

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Then Mr Okonedo from flat 1409 said he had walked past the bus depot and over the sheep fence to the top of the hill behind the estate, and the moon up there was whole, bright enough to read by. Nobody believed him. He had a bad knee and a worse habit of lying about buses. But he drew it for us on the back of a rent reminder: a ring of black ink, pressed hard down one side and thinning to nothing at the other, with the moon sat inside like a fishhook, and beneath it the hills, ridge after ridge, lines stacked like the rings of a felled tree.

We pinned that drawing above the sink. Every night after her late shift, Nessa stood there with her hands in the washing-up and counted the stars she could make out past the flats opposite, which was never many, because the streetlights never switched off. She said the hills on the card were the only hills she'd ever need.

Three weeks later the lift was mended and she went down in it with a suitcase and didn't look back. The card is still above my sink. Come here, now. Look through the glass, past the car park, and tell me what you see. Go on. That's a moon, that is, and it's whole.