Black and grey outline tattoo of a smiling crescent moon with the words LA LUNA and the number 23, on the inner forearm near the wrist.

Crescent moon and La Luna on a wrist

Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A black and white photograph of a fine outline tattoo on the inner wrist. A crescent moon with a simple face sits in the centre, with the words LA LUNA in block capitals below it and the number 23 above. The lines are solid black with no shading, and the composition is tightly framed on the wrist.

Forearm Moon Crescent moon Face Text Outline

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The moon had to be drawn in one unbroken line, Mrs Okafor said, or the customers would think the booth was a cheat. I had the brush loaded with black enamel and the ladder wobbling against the pier rail at Saltcombe, and she stood below with her arms folded, watching me the way she watched the tide tables. Number 23, she said, was the booth at the far end, where the boards were soft and the gulls sat in a row like magistrates.

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I drew the crescent first, thin at the horns and fat in the belly, then the face, which took the longest. Two dots for eyes, a sly curve for the mouth, a nose that looked as if someone had pinched it in disapproval. She said the moon should look like it knew your secrets and was not going to tell. I told her a moon that talks is a moon you pay for. She laughed so hard she had to sit down on a bollard.

The letters came last, LA LUNA in plain block capitals, because she refused anything curly. That night the fog came in off the water and swallowed the whole pier, except the moon, which glowed where the lamp caught the wet enamel. Customers walked straight to it out of the murk, one after another, and not one of them asked the price.

She paid me in fish suppers and a folded note I still keep, which says only: keep the line unbroken. I have. Forty years on, I still start every sign with the moon, I still count the booths from the far end, and I still tell apprentices that the face is the part people will ask about.