Black and grey dotwork calf tattoos showing a full moon, crystals, a cactus, an open hand with an eye in the palm, a moth and morel mushrooms.

Moon, crystals, cactus and eye hand on both calves

Dotwork · Other · Black and grey · Photo

Two calves are covered with black and grey tattoos of a full moon, quartz crystals, a cactus, an open hand with an eye in the palm, a moth, a coiled serpent, a small lantern and morel mushrooms. The linework is fine and the shading is built from stippled dots and hatching. Dotted circles and a triangle connect the motifs across both legs.

Dotwork Botanical Geometric Other Moon Crystal Cactus Hand Eye Moth Serpent Lantern Mushroom Star

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The water came up the Long Level in the second week of February, and by the third the men had stopped saying it would go down. Mary Ashworth sat at her kitchen table with the lamp turned low and a cutting of prickly pear in a jam jar, the one a sailor had traded her husband for a bottle of gin. Her son Samuel was still below. Nobody told her how far the water had reached, only that the pumps had stopped and the men came up grey and quiet.

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Her grandmother had always said a lamp left in the window could be seen from the shaft, and that the moon was only the sky's lamp, lit so folk could find their way home when the rest of the world went dark. So each night Mary carried the jar to the sill, and each night the moon rose over the spoil heap, full and cratered like a bread crust. A moth came to the glass and would not leave. Its wings were the colour of wet slate, and she thought it was the same moth that had come the night her husband died, though that was foolishness.

On the fourth night she saw a green light on the hill, moving between the beds where the wet ground grew morels that nobody else would pick. She followed it in her shawl. At the mouth of the old adit stood a tall man with an open palm, and an eye in the middle of it that watched the water without blinking. He showed her the crystals glittering in the rock wall, clear as glass, and said water only ran where the stone let it. Then he took up a coil of rope and went down ahead of her.

Samuel came up at first light behind the pump men, carrying a bundle of morels and a crystal the size of a thumb. He said the water had found a crack and gone elsewhere. Mary set the crystal on the sill beside the cactus, and the moon went down behind the hill. The following spring the prickly pear flowered, which nobody in that valley had ever seen it do.