Fine line black tattoo of two hands holding a crystal ball with stars and a crescent moon on a forearm, beside a butterfly and a flower.

Hands holding a crystal ball on a forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

Two outlined hands with long pointed nails cup a circular crystal ball containing a crescent moon, a small diamond shape and scattered stars. The linework is fine and black with stippled dots at the cuffs and stars, and the design is shaded in black only. Partial butterfly and floral tattoos sit at the lower left and right edges of the frame.

Fine line Forearm Hand Moon Star Butterfly Flower

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The fishwife Maud Carrow kept a glass ball on her windowsill in the village of Stennick, where the tide came up over the causeway twice a day and nobody trusted anyone who lived past the chapel. Every evening she lifted it in both hands and said the names of the boats still out, one by one, until the lamp at the harbour mouth had been counted in. Her neighbours thought it a vanity. The glass was cloudy as milk, and inside it, if you tilted it to the candle, a thin moon hung with a spill of stars.

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The spring the herring failed, a boy named Tobias Venn came up from the quay with his cap in his fists and asked her to look for his father. Maud said the glass did not work on the sea, only on the people who had gone out on it. So she sat him down, and she held the ball between her palms the way her grandmother had shown her, fingers long and careful, and she watched the crescent turn slowly toward the west.

She told him his father was on the far side of the Skerries, drifting but dry. Then she told him the truth, which was that she could not see the boat at all, only the moon, and the moon was always the same moon. Tobias went quiet. Maud set the ball down and pushed it across the table to him.

He lifted it the way she had. Somewhere past midnight the Venn boat came in under the lamp, and Tobias was on the quay before anyone had rowed out to meet it.