Black and white photo of a hand with fingers spread, showing a small fine line tattoo of four moon phases in a diagonal row on the back of the hand near the thumb.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Four moon phases on the back of a hand

Fine line · Hand · Black and grey · Photo

A hand with fingers spread against a dark background, photographed in black and white. Four small moon phase shapes, ranging from crescents to a filled circle, sit in a diagonal row across the back of the hand near the thumb. The ink is solid black with clean, delicate edges and the composition is simple and centred on the tattoo.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The skipper wants the tide sorted before the kettle boils, so you wipe the grease pencil marks off the bulkhead above the hotplate and start again. Four little moons climb the galley wall at a slant: the thin crescent, the half, the lopsided one, and then the full round thing that makes the deckhands go quiet when they see it chalked there. Eleven days out of Grimsby and nobody has yet asked why the cook keeps a calendar in the sky above the porridge pot.

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Nobody needs to ask, really. The flood runs hard under the Dogger on the big tides, and a trawler that gets its timing wrong spends the night rolling on its own nets. Your father taught you to read the moon before you could read the menu, sitting on an upturned crate at the back of the fish market, and he said the sea keeps its own time and only the lazy look at a clock. So you copy the phases down each morning before the first brew, and the mate calls you the almanac, which you pretend to hate.

On the night the net comes up heavy you are sent down to feed the watch at three, and the galley is a clatter of tins and swearing. Lenny burns his fingers on the lid of the stew pot and laughs about it. Through the porthole the moon sits fat and white over the water, exactly where the chalk said it would be, and the skipper stands in the doorway with his oilskins steaming and says the tables are wrong. You tell him the tables are only as honest as the people who print them.

After the watch goes back up you rub the full moon off the bulkhead with your thumb and draw a fresh crescent in its place. The sea doesn't need a calendar to know what comes next, but the men do, and the wall is a good place to start counting again.

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