Lotus and crescent moon back tattoo

She wanted the sideshow backdrop repainted before the ground opened in Kettering, a night sky hung behind the Wheel of Wonders. I had only ever done lilies on the coconut shies, lotus heads with their petals fanned like a row of open palms, but she was insistent. I shaded the crescent thin as a fingernail, then built the clouds underneath with a sponge and a bowl of thinned soot, the way my nan taught me to make weather on the side of a coal cart.

Under the lamps I lost track of the hours. Stars came out in my hands: a dot, a flick, a dot. Sometime after midnight the generator coughed and the whole field went dark except for the work light, and in that small yellow cone the soft grey gradients looked like real water rolling over stone. Mother Greaves came back with two mugs of tea and stood a long while without saying anything.

"Well," she said at last, "the moon's not fat now." She paid me in a tin of sugared peanuts and a promise I could keep the ladder. Next morning the fair rolled on to the next town with the painted sky folded in the back of the lorry, and I still think of that moon, sliding out of the wagon's dark and waiting for someone to look up.