Black and grey engraved-style tattoo on the upper arm of a kneeling figure with a sword through its head, beside a crescent moon and small stars.

Kneeling figure with sword and crescent moon

Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A kneeling, headless figure leans forward with a sword piercing where its head would be, and a small eye is drawn on its arm. A crescent moon and four star shapes sit to the right of the figure. The design uses fine black linework and dense hatching in an engraving style, in black ink only, on a bare upper arm.

Upper arm Sword Crescent moon Star Eye

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The smith at Corran Point would not hammer a blade for a man who wanted to kill a thing he could still see. Peter Ashe learned this the hard way, coming back up the shingle with his sleeve torn and the iron still warm in his bag. The woman at the cottage door heard him out, took his coin, and sent him down to the cellar where the old moon lay floating in a basin of black water. "Make it for something that cannot look back," she said. "Then come up and tell me what it cost."

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Long before that, a fisherman's wife called Oonagh had knelt at the end of the pier every night and asked the sea to bring her husband home. The sea took her head as payment and rolled it under the stones. It gave the rest of her back to the shore to keep watch, and it set her eyes in her arms so she could look out over the water. The moon kept her company, and the stars came out to count the nights she waited.

Peter worked the blade through a whole winter, folding the iron seven times and quenching it in rainwater he had carried from the top of the cliff. On the last night of the frost he went down to the pier with a lantern and drove the sword through the empty place where her head had been. The figure folded forward over it without a sound. The moon slid off the basin and dropped into the harbour like a coin into a well.

In the morning the sword was still standing in the shingle, pointing at the sky, and the stars had come down to sit on its crosspiece. The boats came in on that light, one by one, and the sea kept the dark side of the water for itself.