Black line drawing sheet of moon glyphs labelled with words such as Hope, Earth and Fire, plus eight moon phase symbols, on a cream background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Moon glyphs and lunar phase symbols

Black and grey · Flash

A flash-style sheet of single-line glyphs, each with a handwritten label such as Hope, Earth, Balance, Fire, Dark and Death. The lower rows show eight moon phases from new moon to waning crescent, drawn as simple circles with shaded or open sections. The drawing is in black ink on a cream background with no colour.

Moon Glyph Symbol Moon phase Crescent Full moon Circle Crescent moon Spiral Star

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The banns were read on three Sundays, and on the third the miller's daughter Maud asked the priest what the signs above the chapel door meant. He had painted them himself the year before, on the advice of a travelling man who sold him ink. Hope, Earth, Balance, Fire. Air, Light, Crown. The priest said they were only names for things a person might want in a house. Maud said that was no answer, since a house could hold a fire without a sign for it.

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Her betrothed, Owen Carrick, had a field running down to the river, and he had promised to plough it when the moon was waxing and the ground was willing. Maud counted the nights on the back of a flour sack. New moon, first quarter, waxing gibbous, full. The wedding would fall on the full moon, when the bells could be heard at the far mill. Her mother wanted the new moon instead, because a dark sky hides a bride's nerves, and the two women argued through a whole batch of bread.

On the night before, Owen came to the door with a lantern and a copy of the glyphs he had made by hand from the chapel wall. He pointed at the Death sign, an eye with a dot in it, and said it was the one he feared most. Maud said it was only an eye that had closed, and that the priest had drawn it wrong. Then she took the chalk from the mantel and drew the waning gibbous beside it, and told him the moon would come back in a fortnight whatever they chose.

They married on the full moon, and the bells were heard at the mill. Ever after, the miller's daughter kept the flour sack folded in the chest with the counted nights still on it, so that when anyone asked when the marriage began, she could show them the sky.