Black lettering tattoo reading I love you to the moon and back, with stars and a crescent moon, across a person's upper back shoulder, with a grey rose tattoo visible at the edge of the frame.

I love you to the moon and back on a shoulder

Lettering · Shoulder · Black and grey · Photo

The photograph shows a person's upper back and shoulder blade with a tattoo of the words I love you to the moon and back. The script mixes flowing and bold lettering, with the word moon larger than the rest, and small stars and a crescent moon surround the text. The ink is black and grey, and a partly visible grey rose tattoo sits at the left edge of the frame.

Lettering Shoulder Lettering Quote Moon Crescent moon Star Rose

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The Pryce and Dunmore Travelling Circus had nine wagons left by the summer of 1962, and the big top had more patches than canvas. My sister Nell and I still flew at the end of the programme, because nobody had yet told us the crowds had stopped coming. Each night before the drumroll she hung from her knees on the high platform, found my face in the dark below, and mouthed the same thing: to the moon. I always gave her the rest back, and back, though I was too far down to know whether she could read it.

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By August the elephant had gone to a farm outside Lincoln and the ringmaster was selling the lamps one by one to cover the feed bill. The council wanted the field for houses. Nell's knees had started to lock on the bar, so she practised with her eyes shut, counting the chalk stars I'd drawn on the rigging beams so she'd know where the crescent hung above her. Stars don't move, I told her. Neither do my nerves, she said, and climbed up anyway.

On the last night the generator coughed out at the start of the second act, and the tent went black except for a seam of moonlight through the open flap. Nobody in the seats moved. Nell swung off the platform regardless. I felt the bar hum through my palms as she came, and for three long seconds she hung against the pale canvas like a cut-out in a shop window. I caught her wrist. Her grip was wet and steady. To the moon, she breathed. And back, I said, and the eleven people left in the stands decided it was part of the act.

Morning came grey. The wagons went north in a line, and the rain washed the chalk stars off the beams before anyone thought to ask for them. Nell still keeps the crescent I drew on the back of an old programme, folded small in her purse, and I still say the words to her whenever the lights go down.