Black and grey geometric tattoo of stacked moon phases running down the spine on a bare back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Moon phase column down the spine

Geometric · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A vertical column of eight circles runs down the centre of the back, shaded from solid black at the top to outlined circles near the bottom to show the phases. The subject is seen from behind with blonde hair in a top knot, and the tattoo is the clear focus against smooth skin. The image is in black ink and greys, with a dark patterned wall and a mirror behind.

Geometric Back Moon phase Moon Circle Spine Column

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The school hall still smells of floor polish and oranges, and someone has hung paper stars from the basketball hoops, which tells you the committee gave up on any theme. You find your name badge on the trestle table, written in biro with your old surname, the one you dropped at eighteen and somehow never fully lost. You pin it to your coat without reading it properly. Across the room Dev Okafor is holding a plastic cup as though it owes him money, and he spots you before you can look away.

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He wants to talk about Mr Pryce, the science teacher who made the whole of Year Nine draw the moon every night for a term. Eight circles in a jotter, the same size, shaded from solid black at the top to a bare outline at the bottom, so the phases ran down the page like a dropped string of beads. Dev said nobody would ever need it. You kept your jotter anyway, in a shoebox under the bed, and the eight circles have stayed in your head for twenty years without any help.

Pryce died in March. His sister posted the leavers' list on the reunion page with a note saying he had left a box for whoever drew the neatest moons. Dev has it in the boot of his car, and inside, under the spare tissue paper, is your jotter with a sticky note on the cover in Pryce's cramped capitals: WATCH THE BOTTOM ONE. IT COMES BACK.

You walk out to the car park when the speeches are over. The moon sits thin above the bins, a paring with its lit edge toward the school, and you stand under it until your eyes adjust. It is waning, you think, and it will be less tomorrow, and then it will be nothing for a night before it begins to fill again, which is the only part of the lesson you actually believed.