Black and grey dotwork drawing of a crescent moon with a smiling face and outlined stars, on a cream background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Crescent moon with face and stars

Dotwork · Black and grey · Flash

A crescent moon with a sleeping or smiling face in profile sits at the centre of the drawing, with small craters shaded in dots. Five-pointed stars with outlined edges are scattered around it. The moon is built from fine stippled shading, while the stars are clean outlines, all in black ink on a cream background.

Dotwork Moon Crescent moon Face Star

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You come up the shaft at ten past five, when the sky above the winding gear has gone the colour of wet slate and the moon is still hanging over the spoil heap as if nobody told it the night was over. Your lamp is spitting its last. Dai Probert, who has worked the Nant seam since before you could walk, watches you unclip it and says the moon is the only honest thing in the valley, because it shows its face once a month and never pretends it has nothing to hide.

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You walk down Heol Isaf with the others, boots heavy with coal dust, past the chapel and the lamp-room door where someone has chalked five-pointed stars in a row, one for every man who came out of the Nant in a box and one for every man who came out alive. You have never counted them properly. Dai says the stars are cheap, a wife's way of saying something when there was nothing else to say. The moon is different, he says. It has watched these hills longer than the coal has been burning, and it wears that half-smile because it has seen every shift change and knows exactly how many men are still underground.

Tonight the lane is quiet. Megan Probert is at her gate with a flask of stewed tea and a tin of bara brith wrapped in a tea towel, and she doesn't ask you anything. She just presses the tin into your hands and nods up at the sky, where the crescent has slid a hand's width west and somehow looks more awake for it.

You stand there longer than you mean to, counting. Five stars close to the crescent, then four more scattered past the chimney, then the faint ones you can only find once your eyes have forgotten the lamp. By the time you go in, the moon has turned its face towards the pit head, still smiling, and you find you are smiling back at it.