Black and grey crescent moon tattoo with a carved face, four stars and dotted chains with drop pendants, placed on the upper back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Crescent moon and stars on upper back

Dotwork · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A crescent moon with a face in profile sits at the centre of the design, with four small sparkling stars around it. Dotted chains and teardrop pendants hang from the lower curve of the moon, and fine swirling lines decorate its inner edge. The piece is rendered in black ink and grey shading on a broad, pale area of upper back, with the moon filling most of the frame.

Dotwork Back Moon Crescent moon Face Star Chain Bead Drop Swirl

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The toll bridge at Cassock Ford had been shut since the spring floods, so when the lorry's headlights swung across the water at a quarter past two, I knew it was nobody with business. I pulled my oilskin over the ledger and took the lantern down from its hook. My grandfather had punched a crescent moon into the tin hood of it, a face in profile looking east, and under the face a string of tin beads threaded on wire so they rattled when the wind got up. Nobody had the nerve to repaint it.

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The driver wound his window down halfway and said he was carrying flour for a bakery in Lessing. His hands stayed on the wheel at ten past two, which I noticed, because men telling the truth tend to rest their hands. The cab smelled of wet sacking. In the back, under the tarpaulin, something shifted with a sound like coins poured into a jar.

I did not ask him to open the back. Instead I raised the lantern so the moon caught the rain, and the beads swung and threw small bright shadows across his face. I said the bridge would reopen at six, and that the river had taken two men last winter who thought they knew it. He looked at the moon for a long time. Then he reversed, slowly, and went back the way he had come, and I wrote the time in the ledger as 2:20 and the word nothing beside it.

In the morning the sergeant from the county came asking about lorries. I showed him the ledger, the blank line and the lantern, its beads still wet and turning on their wire. He said my grandfather would have had the flour off that lorry before the kettle boiled. Perhaps. But my grandfather never once sent a man into that river, and I have decided that is a better thing to be remembered for than a sharp eye.