Black dotwork crescent moon tattoo on the upper back, with stippled shading fading out along the left edge of the moon.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Crescent moon on upper back

Dotwork · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A solid black crescent moon sits on the upper back, with its outer left edge built from dense dots that fade into the skin. The inner curve is left as clear skin, which gives a simple, open outline. The image is a close, plain photograph in soft natural light, with the subject's blonde hair and a thin chain visible at the top of the frame.

Dotwork Back Crescent moon Moon

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The dust had come up the valley again by the time Ada Pryce pinned the washing on the line, a grey skin on the sill and the sheets that her mother swore was worse than rain. Her father would be on the last cage by eight, black to the eyes, and the kettle was already on the range for his bath in the tin tub.

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Ada took the chalk out to the tip path before supper, because old Gwyn Hopkins had told her that a crescent moon hanging low over the colliery meant the men would come up whole. He was a pitman with one lung and a grudge against the owners, and he believed in the moon the way he believed in the coal, as something put there to be dug under. "Watch the paring," he said, pointing with his pipe. "Thin as that, the roof holds."

When the cage rattled up at half past eight, her father stepped out blinking, his lamp dark on his helmet. Ada held out the lamp-glass she had been rubbing with vinegar and newspaper all afternoon, and he laughed, the first laugh she had heard from him since Tuesday. Where the soot had settled thickest the glass was dim and furred, but where her cloth had gone round the curve it shone.

"Clear bit's the moon," she said. "Everything else is the pit." He looked at the glass for a long time, then up at the sky over the wheel, where the paring hung exactly where Gwyn had pointed. He said nothing. He only fixed the lamp back on his cap and walked home under it, the light going out in front of him in a thin, steady arc.