Flash sheet of seven rows of hand-drawn moon phases, crescents and full moons, some joined by thin branching linework, over a pink and blue galaxy backdrop.

Moon phase flash sheet on a galaxy background

Colour · Flash

The image shows a flash sheet of moon phase designs arranged in rows, from crescents to full moons. Most moons have fine stippled shading and craters drawn in dark linework, and several rows are linked by thin, branch-like vines or stems. The moons are tinted pink, purple and blue against a starry galaxy background, with small dots spaced between some of the bottom-row figures.

Moon Moon phase Crescent Full moon Branch Vine Galaxy Star Dot

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mind the step, it's still wet from the mop. Come in, come in, the ovens have been on since two and the place is warm as a dog's belly. You want the story of the moon sheet? My mother, Grace Tully, pinned it above the proving bench the winter I was nine, and she never once let me take it down to dust.

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She said the moons were held together by the bindweed that grows along the canal wall, those thin black stalks that run from one phase to the next and never quite let go. Every Friday she chalked a moon on the slate by the door. And every Friday she swore the waning ones made the dough sulk, so you had to coax it with a longer rest and a damp cloth, the way you'd talk a cat off a wardrobe.

Then one February the moon went out for three nights running. Clouds sat on the river like wet sacking. Mum wouldn't light the ovens. She sat on a flour sack with her hands in her lap, and my brother Declan, who never could sit still, went round the bench muttering that the sheet was only ink on paper and we should sell it to the man from Leeds who collects such things.

On the fourth morning I came in at half four and there it was, a new crescent hanging over the canal, thin as a cut fingernail. The vines on the sheet had a fresh leaf on each one. Mum was already on her feet, shaping loaves. Hand me the peel, she said. The moon's back, and it'll want its breakfast.