Small solid black crescent moon tattoo on the side of a ribcage, with a dark top lifted beside it.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Crescent moon tattoo on the ribs

Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A small, solid black crescent moon sits on the side of a torso, with the upper body and face out of frame. The moon is filled with black ink and has crisp edges, set against smooth skin in warm lighting. The composition is close and centred on the tattoo, with a dark top, a hand with red nails and a few beaded bracelets at the edges.

Ribs Moon Crescent moon Crescent

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The cage stuck at the four hundred foot landing for the best part of an hour, and when it finally dropped us back into the cold the sky above the winding gear had gone the colour of pewter. My father always said a crescent over the slag heap meant the pit would give back what it had taken, though he never said when. He had been a lamp man for thirty-one years and trusted the moon more than the manager.

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I walked home down Colliery Row with the dog at my heels and the cinders crunching under my boots. Mrs Pringle's curtains were already open, the way they always were when a shift ran late, and she lifted one hand from the sill without waving it. Eddie had come off the same shift as me, but he had stopped at the top of the drift to fix a lamp chain, and the last I saw of him was his shape against the lit doorway of the pit head, cursing the chain in a voice that carried.

The moon was low and thin, with its dark half turned towards the village so that only the bright edge showed. Father used to tell us that the dark part was the part you carried home yourself, and that nobody else could see it, which was why men on the night shift never talked about it. I had never understood him until that night, standing at our back gate with my hand on the latch.

I sat on the step and waited. The kettle ticked on the range behind the door. Somewhere past the allotments a whistle sounded twice, short and then long, the signal Eddie had used since he was a boy. I left the door on the latch, poured a cup I did not drink, and watched the moon hold its shape until the grey came up over the hills and swallowed it.