Black crescent moon tattoo on the upper back of a person with hair in a bun, seen from behind in a black crop top.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Crescent moon tattoo on upper back

Back · Black and grey · Photo

A photograph taken from behind of a person with dark hair in a bun and black nail polish. A small, solid black crescent moon tattoo sits on the upper back, to the side of the spine near the shoulder. The ink is a single flat black tone against pale skin, and the background is a plain pink wall with a bed and folded fabric at the lower edge.

Back Crescent moon Moon

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lock at Sallow Bridge only opened on a waxing moon, and Abel Pryce had never once argued with it. Mags learned that in her first week aboard the Thessaly, when he stood on the towpath with a lantern and refused to lift a paddle while the sky was black. 'Water remembers what the sky is doing,' he said, and tapped the wheelhouse door, where a row of crescents had been painted in tar and white lead, one for every month he had worked the cut.

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Mags asked him once what the black ones meant. He said the dark nights were for mending, not travelling, and that a boat with no moon was only a coffin with a chimney. She laughed, then saw he was not joking. Through the winter he taught her the locks by feel: the gate beams, the sluice paddles that screamed in frost, the way the cut narrowed under the viaduct where the bricks sweated.

In March the fever took his breath. On the last evening he could still speak, he had her hand him the pot of paint and the thin brush. He drew one more crescent beside the rest, then, shaking, a second beneath it, curving the other way, and pressed the brush into her palm. 'Waxing and waning,' he managed. 'Both are the moon. You only need the one that's coming.'

She took the Thessaly down at the dark of the moon and waited at the gate with the lamp swinging at her bow. When the first thin silver edge showed above the poplars, she leaned on the paddle and felt the water lift under the hull. On the door she painted the crescent again, a little crooked, and left it to dry.