Black and grey realism tattoo of a cratered moon partly veiled by clouds, placed centrally on a person's upper back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Moon and clouds on upper back

Realism · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A photograph of the upper back of a person with dark hair tied up, showing a small tattoo of a full moon with visible craters and shading. A soft band of clouds sits across the lower part of the moon. The image is black and white, with fine shading in the moon and clouds set against smooth skin.

Realism Back Moon Cloud Crater

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You climb the broken stair of Hollin Keep with the surveyor's telescope wrapped in your coat, because Mr Abernethy swore the moon would clear the north wall by nine and would only show itself for an hour. The lead has gone from the roof. The wind comes through the arrow slits as if it has an appointment.

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He sets the brass tube on its tripod in the chapel, where the altar stone is still whole and the rain has not yet found the saints in the window. You put your eye to the eyepiece until it aches. Grey seas, pits and ridges, and a bank of cloud drifting under the lower rim like milk poured into a saucer. He tells you to draw it exactly, every crater, because the sheets are going to London and a man in Greenwich will check them against his own.

So you draw. The cloud keeps moving, so you learn to shade it in quick strokes and trust the rest. When you hand him the sheet he taps one small crater near the edge with a blunt finger. "That one's wrong." "It's there, I just saw it." "It was there in my father's drawings. Then the rain filled it, and the hill slumped, and nobody on the survey has seen it since."

He does not ask you to rub it out. He takes a pencil from his waistcoat, sets the point beside the crater, and presses once, very lightly, so the mark is almost nothing. Outside, the cloud slides off the lower edge of the moon and the light comes down through the broken roof onto the page, and for a moment the pit you kept is the only thing on it that is not moving.