Black fine line crescent moon with a script quote beside it, tattooed on the outer thigh of a person in a brown knitted cardigan.

Crescent moon and quote on a thigh

Lettering · Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

A small crescent moon with dotted shading sits beside four lines of cursive script reading 'What is simple in the moonlight, by the morning never is.' The linework is thin and mostly black, with light grey shading inside the moon. The tattoo is shown in close focus on a bare thigh, with the wearer's hands holding a brown cardigan above it.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Nikandros, the tables you sent back from the harbour office are wrong again, and I have spent three nights on the roof of the Serapeum with the bronze astrolabe and a cup of cold barley water trying to find out where. Your note said the moon's road across the sky was a plain arc, measured once and settled. It is not plain. Last night at the second hour the crescent sat a finger's width lower than your figures promised, and I stayed up until the lamps went out in the reading rooms to see whether it would correct itself.

Keep reading

It did not. By the time the sky went the colour of pewter over the lighthouse, the thin horn of the moon had slipped behind the western wall and dew was soaking my sleeves. I copied the bearings onto a wax tablet and then, because my hand was cold and stupid, wrote my grandmother's saying in the margin: what is simple in the moonlight, by the morning never is. I meant it as a joke against myself. Then I looked at it again and thought it was the truest line anyone has given me all year.

So I am sending you the corrected column, with the error marked in red ink where the wax has cracked. Do not send the tables to the harbour yet. Ask Stratonike at the library to lend us the copy from Rhodes, and tell her I will bring the good lamp oil myself.

Your sister, Thaleia. P.S. Burn this letter after you have read the margin, or the clerks will think I have started writing poetry.

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