Back of a woman's neck with a fine line black tattoo of a crescent moon with a star and sun rays, above the word Sum, with her hair in a bun.

Crescent moon and sun tattoo on the nape

Fine line · Neck · Black and grey · Photo

Seen from behind, a fine black linework tattoo of a crescent moon with a small star inside it sits on the nape of the neck, surrounded by short radiating sun rays. Below it, the word Sum is written in thin script, and a further partial line of lettering is cut off by the frame. The tattoo is shown in black ink against pale skin, with a gold hair cuff and blurred background people behind.

Fine line Neck Moon Crescent moon Star Sun Script Word

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The last ship that came down to the salt flats of Orrin carried a woman who would not give her name, only a word the children could not pronounce. Sum, she said when they asked. I am. The elders argued over whether that was a name or a boast, and while they argued she walked out past the kelp terraces each night and sat with her back to the village, looking up.

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The moon over Orrin was no longer a whole moon. The grandmothers said the Engineers had cut it in half to feed their mirror farms, and what remained hung thin as a fingernail with a single bright star caught inside its hook. Nobody had told the star where to go, so it stayed with the sliver of moon the way a dog stays with a cart.

One night a boy called Teodric followed her out with a lamp. He found her drawing in the crust of the flats with a stick: a crescent, a point inside it, and a ring of short rays around the whole thing like a child's sun. Why draw it here, he asked. She said the sun would come back one day to light the moon, and the moon would need a shape to be known by when it did. Then she touched the place below her collar where the same drawing was inked and said, that is where I keep it.

The mirror farms burned the next summer. Afterwards the village found the flats scorched in the same pattern, and in the ash lay a small brass coil bent into a ring of rays. Teodric wore it in his hair for the rest of his life, and on clear nights he would walk out past the terraces and tell the star where it was.