Black and grey crescent moon with shaded stars and tribal swirls tattooed down the side of the ribs.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Crescent moon and stars along the side

Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A crescent moon shaded in grey sits at the centre of the design, with small shaded stars and black curling swirls and leaf-like tendrils running up and down the design. The bold black linework contrasts with the soft grey shading on the moon and stars. The tattoo is framed against plain, dark skin with the composition running diagonally across the torso.

Ribs Moon Crescent moon Star Swirl Tendril Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

By the time the cloud drops into the gully below Greyhollow pass, you have already lost the path twice, and the mule bell has gone quiet behind you. Ruth, the carter's boy, is hunched on the cart's tailboard, and the lantern oil is down to a finger's depth. You tell him to stop staring at the drop and look up instead, because the sky has started to tear open along the ridge.

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The moon comes through first, a pared white edge hooked over the col like a sickle someone left in the hay. Stars follow in ones and twos, pricking through the wet. Old Mair, who crossed this saddle every autumn for forty years, told you that the stars in the high passes are the only honest maps, because the valley folk draw lies on their doors. She used to trace the frost ferns on the rock with her thumb and say the wind was writing down who had come through.

You follow the curl of a stone ledge that bends like a fern frond, the way she showed you, and the cart wheels find hard ground again. Halfway down, the cloud lifts a hand's width, and there is the waystation lamp below, the one your sister keeps lit every night she is alone with it.

Ruth asks whether the moon is watching them. You tell him it is only pointing the way down, its horns turned towards the lamp, and you let him believe it, because the lamp is burning and the oil will last until dawn.