Black and white photo of a person seen from behind with a small solid black crescent moon tattoo on the upper back near the shoulder.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Crescent moon tattoo on upper back

Back · Black and grey · Photo

A black and white photograph of a person seen from behind, with dark hair in a bun and one hand raised to the head. A small, solid black crescent moon sits on the upper back near the shoulder and neck, with clean edges and no visible shading. The black top, bare lower back and soft natural light in a plain room keep the focus on the tattoo.

Back Crescent moon Moon

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The moon came down into Sallow Mere the autumn the old ferryman died, and nobody in Harrow End thought to fish it out until the frost had skinned the water. Mabel Quarles went first, because she had lent him her boots and felt the lending was still hers to settle. She waded to the reeds with a lantern and found the moon lying on the silt like a sliver of pale bone, one edge chipped, cold enough to ache in the teeth.

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She did not carry it home. Her grandmother had taught her never to bring a borrowed thing across the stile after dark. So she sat on the bank and asked who wanted the moon back. The miller's wife said it belonged to the church. The vicar said it belonged to the sky, and the sky had done nothing wrong. Only old Hob Stennet, who lived in the last cottage before the trees, said the moon had been lent to the mere by a fox, and the fox wanted paying.

Mabel took a sack of hazelnuts and a length of red thread to the edge of Thornwood at moonrise. The fox was there, sitting upright on the stile as if it had waited all week. It looked at the thread, then the lantern, then her. "Wrap the moon in thread," it said, in a voice like a rusted gate, "and hang it on the birch by the lych gate. It will rise again, thin at first, and grow every night you keep your word." She did as she was told, and the moon climbed out of the water that night, bright as a coin.

Each new moon after that, Mabel carried hazelnuts to the stile and set them on the top rail, and each morning the moon was a little fuller than before. The village stopped asking why she never went to church. They saw her shave thin silver curls from the birch bark and pin them to her door, and they understood she was keeping count. When she died, the moon hung over the lych gate as a bright crescent, and the fox sat beside her grave with its tail wrapped round its feet, waiting for someone to say the debt was paid.