Black and white lettering design of a crescent moon with a seated silhouette figure, the script words set within the moon's black shape.

Crescent moon with seated figure and script

Lettering · Black and grey · Flash

A black crescent moon with a small seated silhouette figure resting on its lower curve. The moon's solid black body is filled with white script lettering that follows the curve, with words including love, moon and back again visible. The design is strongly contrasted on a plain white background, with the figure and lettering set in negative space.

Lettering Moon Crescent Silhouette Figure Script Lettering Text

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The spoil heap behind Coronation Row is the only thing in Hollin Cross tall enough to sit above the chimneys, so after your tea you climb it with a stub of chalk in your coat pocket and your mother's old shawl knotted at your throat. Your father's shift runs until six. The cage drops him a quarter mile under the hills, and nobody up here says what that means out loud, so you say the other thing instead, the one he taught you on the back step when you were small enough to be lifted onto his shoulders.

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Tonight the moon is thin as a fingernail paring, lying on its back above the pithead wheel. You settle on the curve of the tip where the shale has slid into a long pale hook, and you write along it letter by letter, the way he wrote your name in soot on the coal scuttle. Love. Then the word for the moon, which you spell wrong and refuse to fix. Then the part that always made him laugh, the part that turns the whole thing into a promise: back again.

The wind takes the chalk dust before you finish. Down in the valley the lamp room lights go out one by one, the wheel groans into motion, and the first men come up Pit Lane with their lamps bobbing like a line of small moons. You draw the last words bigger so they can be read from the road, and then you sit with your chin on your knees and wait.

At the gate a man stops, takes off his cap, and tips his face up to the sky. He is not looking at the moon. He is reading the hill, the way you knew he would, and he is still laughing when he gets to the end.