Black and white ink drawing of a crescent moon above a circular scene of a breaking wave and a rock under a night sky, a possible tattoo design.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Crescent moon over a wave in a circle

Black and grey · Flash

A black ink drawing of a crescent moon hangs above a circular frame showing a large breaking wave, with a craggy rock on the left and scattered stars in the dark sky. The linework uses fine hatching and stippling to shape the wave crests, the rock and the moon's rim, with the background left solid black. The composition is centred and symmetrical, with the moon and the circle sitting one above the other.

Moon Crescent moon Wave Sea Rock Star Circle

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The moon was a paring of light over Gull Stack when I climbed up to relieve Pascoe, and he met me at the door with his coat already buttoned. 'Sea's getting up,' he said. 'Mind the third step, it's gone soft.' He did not look at the glass. He never looked at the glass if he could help it, and I had long since stopped asking why.

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I took the watch at nine. The log is a plain thing: wind, pressure, visibility, and a column for remarks, which I have always kept for birds and boats. At ten the first heavy swell came in under the rock, and I felt it through the iron stair before I heard it. By midnight the crests were breaking higher than the gallery rail, white sheets lit by the lamp as they went over, and the stars had come out thick and small between the cloud, as if someone had shaken salt across a black cloth.

Something in the third sea caught my eye. Among the spray was a dark shape that did not fall back the way the water did. I took the glass up with cold hands and found a dinghy turning slowly in the trough, one oar still lashed to its thwart, and in its bow a boy in a red jersey with both arms wrapped round a sack. I wrote the time first. Then the bearing. Then, under remarks, that I was going down.

The rope was thirty fathoms and the wind took it twice from my hands. Pascoe held the other end and swore at the weather the whole way, which kept me steady. At first light the moon hung pale above the stack, a clean white paring, and the boy was asleep by the stove with a blanket up to his chin. Beneath the night's entries I wrote the only remark that seemed true: boy aboard, alive, sea unsatisfied.