Pencil-style tattoo design drawing of a crescent moon above a feathered arrow, with the words 'You have set on me but you are not the sun' beneath it.

Crescent moon and feathered arrow with quote

Black and grey · Flash

A black pencil drawing on white paper shows a crescent moon above a horizontal arrow with a feathered shaft and a pointed head. Beneath the arrow, a typewriter-style line of text reads 'You have set on me but you are not the sun'. The shading is dark and grainy on the moon and feathers, and the composition is centred with plenty of empty paper around the design.

Crescent moon Arrow Feather Text Quote

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nobody on Gull Stack would have called the moon lonely, though she had reason enough. Every night she rose thin as a paring over the water, and every night the keeper's girl, Ada Lowen, watched her from the gallery rail while her father trimmed the great lamp below.

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Jory Penrose rowed out to the rock the autumn he turned twenty, with a basket of pilchards and a speech he had practised all the way from Porthcurno. He said his eyes had been fixed on her since midsummer, that she was the only light worth steering by, that the whole coast was warmer for her. Ada heard him out with her arms folded against the wind.

"You have set your eyes on me," she said, "and I thank you for the fish. But you have the wrong light in your head. I am not the sun. I have no heat of my own. I only hold what the sun leaves on me and hand it back a little dimmer, so that boats can find the rocks in the dark. Go and court the sun if you want warming."

He laughed and rowed away, and thought no more of it until the October gale came in from the west and took the lamp's oil-line at the worst possible hour. The beam guttered. Out past the Stack, three boats were feeling for the channel with nothing but black water ahead. Ada dragged the old brass reflector off its hook, polished it with her sleeve, and turned it until the thin moon's silver lay across the sea like a path. Jory's boat came in by that path before the rest, shaking and soaked, and he stood on the landing stage not knowing what to say. Ada never asked him to say anything.