Black crescent moon tattoo filled with interlaced knotwork, sitting on the forearm of a person seated in grey jeans.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Crescent moon with knotwork on a forearm

Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A solid black crescent moon sits on the forearm, with its interior filled by a looping interlace or knotwork pattern. The linework is bold and the ink is dense and even, with no colour. The arm is shown against grey denim, with the rest of the body cropped out of frame.

Forearm Crescent moon Moon Knotwork Interlace Celtic knot

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The mate had told Ines to stop counting the days, since the sea did not care for counting, but she scratched a tally with a marlinspike into the oak beside the binnacle anyway. Eleven nights out of Stromness and the moon had worn from full to a thin paring that hung low over the larboard quarter, like a fishhook someone had forgotten to bait.

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Her grandfather had been a sailmaker on the same quay, and he taught her the old way of plaiting a reinforcing seam, over and under, so that no strand ever ended where it could fray. He called the pattern the moon's knot. Every sail he stitched got one worked into its clew, a ring of interlaced cord that never quite closed. A thing that closed was finished, he said, and sailors had no use for finished things.

On the twelfth night a squall tore the spare jib from its stops and dragged it half under the bow. Captain Doig held the lantern while Ines knelt in the wet and re-plaited the corner by feel, her fingers numb and the tarred cord stiff with salt. When the captain asked who had sewn the thing, she said her grandfather had, and that was true enough.

By dawn the jib was bent back on and the new clew showed its open curve, a dark crescent worked in tarred cord. The mate ran his thumb over the knot and said nothing, which from him was praise. Ines looked up at the moon, still pale above the grey water, and found she could see straight through the gap in her knot to the sky.