Fine line crescent moon tattoo in black ink on the forearm, shown against a pale background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Crescent moon outline on a forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A small crescent moon is drawn as a single thin black outline on a forearm. The linework is even and delicate, with no shading or fill inside the shape. The skin is pale and the plain light background keeps the focus on the tattoo, which sits near the centre of the frame.

Fine line Forearm Moon Crescent

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mrs Aldous wanted the north tower roofed before the first frost, and I had the wrong lead flashing and a boy who could not tell lime mortar from cement. So I was up the scaffold at dusk with a torch in my teeth when I found the moon.

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It was cut into the lintel above a window that had been bricked up since before my grandfather's time. Someone had scratched it with a nail or the point of a knife, a single hair-thin curve, and the stone had weathered around the line so it stood out like pencil on paper. No shading, no fill. Just the edge of something that had once been sky. I thought of the old steward's ledger in the estate office, where he had written that the lady of the house kept her midnight hours in that room, watching the river for a boat that never came up it.

I did not tell Mrs Aldous. I told her the lintel was sound, which was true, and I asked the boy to fetch more lime. We worked the bricks out one at a time, and on the third evening, when the light lay low and yellow across the courtyard, the last brick slid free and a draught came through the gap smelling of wet leaves and cold iron.

Behind the wall was a small square room, and in its floor, scratched in the same careful hand, was a second moon, full this time, with a single word beside it in a language I could not read. I sat on the sill for a long while with the torch gone out in my hand. Then I went home and left my window open, in case the boat came up the river after all.