Black and grey crescent moon with stars and tribal swirls tattooed on the side of a person's ribs.

Crescent moon and stars on the side ribs

Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A shaded crescent moon sits at the centre of the design, with small five-pointed stars clustered at its tips and along a curling vine. Black tribal-style swirls and leaf shapes extend up and down the skin, with grey shading giving the moon volume. The design is shown in black and grey on smooth skin, framed against a plain background.

Ribs Moon Crescent moon Star Swirl Vine Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lamp in the customs hut at Coldharbour Pass has been dead since October, so you do the job by moonlight. Every night at ten you climb the concrete step with the ledger under one arm and the wind combing through the fence wire, and you check each lorry's papers against a torch held in your teeth. Your father worked this way too. He used to say the moon never lied about a man's face, only about his luck.

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Tonight a van comes up the switchback with its headlights off. The driver is a thin woman with silver paint dried in the creases of her knuckles, and her papers are in order except for a seal that has been scratched away. You tell her so, and she laughs without much humour. The seal went into the river at Sallow Ford, she says, along with her brother's boots and the brooch he never took off. You ask what the brooch looked like. She turns over a receipt and draws it on the back: a crescent lying on its side, a line of small stars climbing beside it like rungs, and vines curling off both horns as if the moon were growing its own hedge.

You study the drawing for a long time. Then you stamp the ledger with your own mark, the one nobody checks, and hand her the papers back. She pockets the receipt and rolls down the far side of the pass, the tail lights shrinking to two red coins. Behind you the clouds finally pull apart, and the moon shows its pale edge over the ridge, lighting the empty road all the way down to the river.