Crescent moon, woman and rose design

Traditional · Black and grey · Flash

The drawing shows a crescent moon with a crying face on the left and a woman in profile on the right, with a rose and a swallow in her hair. Four-pointed stars sit between the figures, and a banner of two leaves and a flower runs along the bottom, with the words I HOPE above and YOU'RE MISERABLE below. The linework is bold and black, with grey shading on the rose, the swallow and the moon, set on a plain tan background.

Traditional Moon Crescent moon Woman Rose Swallow Star Flower Lettering Banner

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Eileen Mott had worked the switchboard in Harle Cross for eleven years and could tell a lover's call from a row by the way the plug went in. On the Thursday in October that Desmond Vane rang from the Bull's box, she knew before he spoke. He wanted a number in Ferris Road, and he wanted it quietly.

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She connected him, because rules were rules, and listened to him fumble through the two sentences he had clearly rehearsed on the bus. He was sailing from Liverpool on the Tuesday with a girl from the Co-op, bound for Halifax. He wanted Eileen to take a message for Rose Hadley, who arranged the flowers at St Edmund's and had wept into the altar cloth when he failed to turn up for the harvest supper. "Tell her I hope she's happy," he said. Then, after a pause that hissed down the line, "No. Tell her I hope she's miserable."

Eileen wrote it on the pad in pencil, word for word. Then, because nobody had ever asked her to be kind, she rang Rose herself at the florist's on the corner and read it out. Rose said nothing for so long that Eileen thought the line had died. Then came a sound like a swallow breaking from a rafter, and Rose laughed until she coughed, and said she would be doing exactly that, miserable as a wet week, with a bucket of dahlias for the window and the good scissors in her apron pocket.

That night the moon hung over the exchange like a cut-glass lamp, and Eileen unplugged the board early and walked home past the florist's. Through the glass she could see Rose on a stool, bent over a bucket of roses, humming. Eileen did not know whether Desmond Vane would be miserable on the Atlantic. She only knew that he had chosen the wrong word, and that the moon, pale over the rooftops, looked very much like a man who had been told the truth.