Photo of a black linework crescent moon with blue shading and swirling scrollwork tattooed on the inner forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Crescent moon with scrollwork on a forearm

Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A crescent moon sits on the inner forearm with bold black outline and blue shading along its inner curve, leaving the centre of the moon as bare skin. Curling black scrollwork and spirals wrap around the left side of the crescent. The photograph is taken straight on with soft lighting and a shiny blurred background at the top left.

Forearm Moon Crescent Swirl Scrollwork Spiral

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lamp at Skerry Head went out on the ninth night of the gales, and nobody on the mainland could say whether the fishing boats were still out there or already gone. Ailsa Rennie climbed the iron stair with the oil can in one hand, because her father's knee had locked again and the lamp room door had been swollen shut since spring.

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Inside, the great lens sat dark and cold, its brass gone green at the seams. Beneath it, in the store cupboard where nobody had looked since her grandfather's time, she found a spare panel: a crescent of blue glass as wide as her forearm, bent to the shape of a thumbnail moon and bound in black lead. Her grandfather had ordered it for a lamp that was never built. She set it into the empty frame by the window, scraped her knuckles on the rusted curls of the bracket, and lit the wick behind it.

The light that came through was not white. It fell across the spray like a moon that had risen from the sea, and the boats, which had been turning in circles for an hour, found the channel between the stacks and came home one by one. Ailsa stayed at the window until her hands cramped. When the wind dropped at dawn she counted nine boats, then ten, then gave up counting and slept against the cold brass.

The panel is still there. Her father never let anyone take it down, and the fishermen call it the Keeper's Moon even now, though it is only glass. On still nights, when the real moon hangs low, the two of them sit on the water together, one bright and one blue, and no one on the rock has ever thought it necessary to say which is which.