Crying woman profile in a circle with text

Traditional · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A woman's profile with windswept hair and a single tear is enclosed in a circle, with the words LEARN FROM MY MISTAKES set in capitals beneath. The design uses bold black outlines, solid black hair strands and light shading on the face and within the circle. It is shown in black ink and grey tones against a dark background.

Traditional Forearm Woman Profile Tear Moon Hair Text Quote

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Ysolde kept the lamp at Thessaly Mill, and her mother had told her never to look up while the wind came from the west, because the moon would see her face and keep it. The night the grain barges failed to come up the dry channel, she looked up anyway. The moon was not round that night. A long grey wind had cut across it, and its hair was blowing off the edge like smoke from a cook fire.

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The moon spoke in the voice of her aunt, who had gone out to the salt pans years before and not come back. 'You have your mother's mouth,' it said, 'and her foolishness. I was once a girl who believed the sea would keep its promises. I traded the tides for a lantern and a man who could not swim. Learn from my mistakes, child, and do not give your name to anyone who asks for it at a crossroads.'

Ysolde asked what the mistake had been. The moon let one bead of silver fall. It went past the mill roof and struck the cistern, and the water rang like a bell. She understood then that the crying was not grief at all but a ledger, and every tear was a debt somebody had agreed to carry.

At first light she walked to the crossroads with her own name folded small in her fist, and she did not give it up to the thin man who waited there with his hat in his hands. The barges came in on the third day, late and light, and the mill wheel turned. Each year, when the western wind rises, Ysolde climbs the stair and tells the moon no, not yet, and the moon, which has learned its own lesson too, lets its hair blow out and says nothing.