Black script lettering reading I Love You to the moon and back on the side of the body, with a small green crescent moon, stars and a fish outline.

I love you to the moon and back lettering

Lettering · Other · Mixed · Photo

The tattoo reads I Love You in flowing black script on the upper line, with to the moon and back in a smaller, more upright black font beneath it. A small green crescent moon and several four-point stars sit to the right and around the lettering, and a thin outlined fish sits below the words. The text is crisp and evenly weighted on pale skin, with the colour limited to the moon, and the photo is taken at a slight angle under warm indoor light.

Lettering Other Moon Crescent moon Star Fish Script

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The hem was still bristling with pins when Mrs Adeyemi told me to stop sewing and look out of the window. Above the chip shop roof a thin crescent hung in the blue, pale as a sliver of soap. Her son was marrying at eleven the next morning, and the dress was her own mother's, taken in twice already and now needing a third pass before the church.

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'Ray said it to me on our first night in Peckham,' she said, 'lying on a borrowed mattress with the sash window up. I love you to the moon and back. He meant it as a joke, the sort of promise a man makes when he can't yet afford a ring. I laughed, then I cried, then I kept it the way other women keep a pressed flower.' She nodded at the kitchen tiles behind the kettle, where the words had been pencilled years ago and never quite scrubbed away, a small fish drawn beside them because she had once called him her catch.

I asked whether she wanted the hem let down a touch, since the silk had shrunk over the decades. She said no, went to the old wardrobe, and came back with the lining turned out. Stitched inside the seam, folded small as a stamp, was a note in faded biro: Back by Tuesday, my moon. Keep the kettle warm. Ray had gone to Hull for a fortnight's work the spring she was carrying their first, and he had come home on the Tuesday with a bag of cod and no sense of time at all.

'Leave it where it is,' she said. 'Some things should stay under the hem.' I sewed the dress back up around the note, stitch by small stitch, and when I glanced at the window again the crescent had slipped behind the roof, and the sky above the chip shop was full of the kind of stars nobody bothers to name.