Matching planet tattoos on wrists

It was the winter of 1961 and the Ross hill was white to the knee. Nell Garrow kept sheep above the loch and had a brass telescope that belonged to her father, who had bought it off a ship's purser for three pounds and a bottle of whisky. Tom came up the track every night that January with a tin of butterscotch and a notebook, insisting the stars were a map nobody had bothered to read. They drew the lot. Saturn with its ring at the top of the page, two little worlds beside it that Nell said looked like shelled eggs, a crescent moon she swore was thinner than it had any right to be, and a scatter of dots for the stars too faint to be sure of.

Then the fog came down on a Thursday, thick as wool, and Tom didn't come up the track. Nell walked down to the village in the dark with the telescope under one arm and found him at the bottom of the lane, turning in circles in his own field and laughing at himself. She didn't say a word. She took his wrist, pressed the pencil into his hand and made him write the pattern on the inside of her arm, so she'd know the way home whatever the weather. He wrote it badly. It was still right.

They were married in the chapel at Glenaird that June, and the first thing Nell did after the vows was hold up her arm to the minister like a receipt. Forty-odd years on, the pattern is still up there above the byre, and Tom swears the moon has gone thinner. Now, where's that bread?