Black ink flash design of a crescent moon framing three pine trees on a plain white background.

Crescent moon with three pine trees

Blackwork · Black and grey · Flash

A solid black crescent moon curves around the lower half of three tall, tiered pine trees of differing heights. The trees have ragged, textured edges, while the crescent has smooth, tapering ends. The image is monochrome black ink on white, with the subject centred and no shading or background detail.

Blackwork Crescent moon Moon Pine tree Tree Forest Silhouette

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The ewes had been lambing since the first frost, and by the third week of January my father had stopped counting them out loud. I took the lantern down the lane past the shelterbelt at ten o'clock, my breath going ahead of me like a dog that knew the way. Over the top of the Scots pines the moon was only a paring, thin as the edge of a bread knife, and it hung so low that the tallest tree seemed to be holding it up.

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Nan Pritchard's bottom field had been Christmas trees before it was sheep, and the three left standing at the bottom of the meadow were planted by her husband the year they married. Nobody had cut them because nobody could agree which one to sell. Tonight they stood in a row against the sky, the middle one tallest, their branches ragged as wet wool. I counted the ewes in the hurdle by the gate, seventeen, then eighteen when a new one shuffled out from behind the hay. The lamb at her side was wobbling but alive.

Coming back up I stopped by the trees because the moon had slid lower, and for a minute the crescent sat right on the crown of the tallest pine, a black curve caught in the branches like a hook. My father had told me the old shepherds kept one tree for each flock and never felled it. I'd thought he was talking rubbish. I put my hand against the trunk, rough and cold, and it did not feel like something that needed me.

In the morning I wrote eighteen in the tally book, and under it, because it was the sort of thing my nan would have done, the time the moon went down behind the tallest tree. Then I went to find my father for breakfast and told him the ewe had lambed twins, which was true, and left out the rest.