Two wrists held up beside crystals: a small fine line crescent moon with a star on the left wrist, and a gold metallic feather on the right forearm.

Crescent moon and gold feather on wrists

Fine line · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

Two hands hold a purple amethyst, a clear quartz point and a cluster of pyrite against a grey backdrop. On the left wrist, a small black crescent moon with a tiny star is drawn in fine, sketchy linework. On the right forearm, a larger gold metallic feather with dotted detail sits at a slight diagonal.

Fine line Forearm Moon Star Feather Crystal Hand

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The snow had been falling since Tuesday, and by the third night the road over Scarrow Pass had vanished, so when the stranger knocked at the back door with frost in her hair, my father swore and let her in anyway. She set three stones on the kitchen table one after another, as if dealing cards: a purple one with a bruise of light inside it, a lump of brassy pyrite that caught the lamp, and a clear quartz point as long as my thumb. "Hold them," she said to me. "Tell me which is warm."

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I held them all. The quartz was coldest, the amethyst kept a small heat of its own, and the pyrite hummed against my palm as if it had been left by the range. My father said that was nonsense and went to bank the fire. The woman, who would not say where she had come from, took a stub of pencil from her coat and drew a crescent moon on the back of an old railway timetable, a little star tucked in its curve. "For the road," she said. "Count your nights by it now."

She left before dawn, when the wind dropped and the drifts lay flat and blue as a plate. We found a feather on the windowsill, long and flecked, the colour of barley with the sun behind it. Its tip was gilded, and when my father lifted it the metal threw a little gold across the ceiling. He wanted to sell it to the carrier. I told him I had counted nine nights already, and the moon on the timetable had not thinned at all.

The road opened on the tenth day. I walked it with the feather in my coat and the timetable in my pocket, and at every crossroads I held out the amethyst to see which way it was warm. It always pointed home.