Black and grey dotwork moon phases in a row across the abdomen, with a small fine line glyph on the centre of the chest.

Moon phases across the abdomen

Dotwork · Other · Black and grey · Photo

A black and white photograph of a torso wearing a black lace bralette. A row of five moon phases, from thin crescent to full moon, runs across the abdomen, with the full moon at the centre and its surface built from stippled dots. A small vertical fine line glyph sits on the centre of the chest above the bralette.

Dotwork Fine line Other Chest Moon Moon phase Crescent Full moon Glyph Symbol

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Pull that stool nearer, the fire's near out and I'll not get up for coal. My grandmother kept the lambing book at Hollin Farm, and in it she kept the moon. Not the way the almanac does, with its little pictures, but the way a woman does who has sat up in a cold barn with a torch between her teeth. Each night she drew the moon as it stood over the top field, thin as a paring at first, then fattening, then full, then thinning again, and beside every drawing she put a dot for every ewe still heavy. When the dots ran out, the lambs came.

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Fifty winters she did it. Then came the year the ewes went strange, carrying too long, the moon going round and round without a single lamb to show for it. My grandfather said the moon was sulking. She said the moon had never sulked in her life and it was the frost getting into the ewes' bellies. She went out on the full night with a pail of meal and a lantern and stood in the field until her feet went white. The frost on the grass had come up in little round dots, thousands of them, so the whole field looked like the moon had been spilt across it and left to set.

She came in grey-lipped and wrote one last dot in the book. Next morning there were two lambs in the low pen, both alive, and a third a day after.

So when you see the moon on the wall, do not count it. Let it count you. That's all the old woman ever had to say, and she said it in four words.