Close-up of a small fine line black crescent moon tattoo on a person's inner ear, with a stud earring in the lobe.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Crescent moon on the inner ear

Fine line · Other · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of a person's ear with a small crescent moon tattoo drawn in thin black linework on the inner ear. The tattoo is the only point of ink, shown in plain black with no shading, and sits in the centre of the frame. A finger rests near the top of the ear, and a small stud earring is visible on the lobe against a warm, soft-toned background.

Fine line Other Crescent moon Moon Ear

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The stationmaster at Thornly Cross kept a lamp lit past midnight, and it was never for the trains. Every night the last goods rolled through without stopping, and every night old Mr Pell climbed the iron ladder to hang the lamp on its hook above the down platform, so that anyone walking the cutting road could see where the rails bent away into the dark.

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One October his granddaughter Nell, who swept the waiting room for a penny a week, asked why the lamp was shaped like a paring of apple. He told her the moon had once lent its light to the railway and never asked for it back, so the railway had made a lamp in its image and kept the bent part for the sky. Nell did not believe him. The next night, while he dozed in the booking office chair, she dragged the ladder across the platform, lifted the lamp off its hook and carried it down the steps to the cutting, where fog lay thick as wool over the points.

The fog swallowed the wall, then the rails, then her own boots. Somewhere up the line a goods engine began to sound its horn, low and wrong, because the driver had no light to steer by. Nell held the lamp as high as her arms would reach and felt the cold metal warm in her hands. She walked the sleepers by the tilt of the light until the horn grew nearer and then steady, and the engine groaned past close enough to lift her hair.

At dawn Mr Pell found her asleep against the signal box with the lamp in her lap. He hung it back on its hook without a word. Above them the real moon had gone pale and thin, a fingernail of silver, as though it had come down to see the lamp return to its place and was pleased to find it there. Nell never swept the cutting again, and nobody at Thornly Cross said the lamp was only a lamp.