Moon on a forearm

The reclamation crew wanted the old survey plates scrapped, so I asked for the stipple kit instead. Every crater on the Mare Imbrium sheet was drawn by hand, one dot at a time, by people who had never stood on the ground. I have spent three weeks in the drafting bay with the lamp angled low, so the shadows come up the way they do from the surface. Dr Okafor says nobody needs hand-dotted maps when the orbiters can image every boulder. I told her the orbiters cannot tell you what it looked like to the people who first counted it.

The work is slow and it gets into your wrist. Dense dots for the dark seas, where the basalt drank the light a few billion years ago, and sparse ones for the highlands, which still glare like unpainted paper. Where the rays of Tycho fan out, I learned to let the dots thin toward the edges so the eye keeps falling outward. On the third night I pressed too hard near the rim of Copernicus and left a grey smudge the size of a fingernail. I tried to lift it with the fine brush and only made it wider.

So I left it. The sheet goes to the relay station on Thursday, and it will hang in the corridor beside the old plates, which nobody has bothered to clean either. Tonight the moon will be full over Cardiff. Look at the left-hand side, where the dark seas gather. That is the place I got wrong. Tell me if you can find it, because it is the only mark on the whole moon that is mine.

All my love, Tom