Two people stand side by side showing matching black crescent moon and script tattoos on their ribs.

Matching crescent moon and script rib tattoos

Lettering · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

Two people are photographed side by side from the waist up, cropped below the shoulders and above the hips, so no faces are shown. Each has an identical black tattoo on the side of the ribcage, a crescent moon with ornamental, feather-like detailing beside a line of stylised script. The ink is solid black with no colour, and the matching designs are framed close together against white and pink clothing.

Lettering Ribs Crescent moon Script Matching tattoo

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lift at Harrow Point had been broken since March, so Nessa and I climbed to the fourteenth floor with a carrier bag of Lucozade and a biro that skipped on every other stroke. Her nan's flat was being cleared on Thursday, and in a biscuit tin under the sink we had found a letter in spidery copperplate, folded around a drawing of a crescent moon with feathers curling off its horns like a wing mid-beat.

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Neither of us could read the looped line beneath it. Nessa said it was Welsh, I said it was Latin, and the letter itself gave up after one sentence about the weather at Margate in 1962. So we made up our own meaning, sitting cross-legged on the balcony while the sodium lights buzzed below. Something about keeping the tide when nobody else would. Nessa said we should each keep a copy, so the moon would face the same way on both of us, because that was how her nan had always slept, turned toward the window.

We traced the drawing onto the back of a council letter, pressing hard so the lines would carry. By the third attempt the feathers looked right and the script looked like nothing at all, which Nessa said was the point. Down in the car park somebody was revving a scooter in tight circles. I counted the windows going dark one by one until only ours and one more above were left lit.

On Thursday the man from the van took the tin, the sink and the curtains. Nessa folded her copy into her purse and held it there with two fingers. "Still got the feathers," she said, and we went down the stairs, because the lift was still broken.