Black and grey dotwork tattoo of seven moon phases arcing across a person's upper back near the shoulder.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Moon phases across the shoulder

Dotwork · Shoulder · Black and grey · Photo

A row of seven moon phases curves in a shallow arc, from a thin crescent on the left through partly lit and full discs to a thin crescent on the right. The shading is built from stippled dots, giving soft grey tones within each circle, and the outlines are left open. The tattoo sits on bare skin against a plain background, with a teal patterned top visible on the right.

Dotwork Shoulder Moon Moon phase Crescent moon Full moon

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Brother Anselm hands you the tally stick before the bell for Matins, the way he has every night since the rains came, and tells you not to let the lamp smoke it black. You climb to the wall of the scriptorium where the slate is set into the masonry, seven holes drilled in an arc, and you know without counting which one is yours. The moon is waning tonight. You push a peg into the third hole from the left and feel the cold of the stone come up through your thumb.

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Forty years of dots, Anselm used to say, and you could read the sky by the dust on his sleeves. He taught you to stipple the calendar into the parchment with the tip of a quill, one dot for every hour the moon was lit, because the abbot would not trust a line that might drift. The feast of the Resurrection depends on it. Get the full moon wrong and the whole valley keeps the wrong Sunday, and the pilgrims arrive with their candles and hopeful faces to an empty church.

Last spring the moon sat full over the orchard and Anselm did not come down from the wall. You found him there at dawn, wrapped in his cowl, one hand still open on the slate. He had marked the full disc with a dozen tiny pricks, grey where the lamp had dimmed, and beside it a sliver on either side, thin as paring knives, each one lighter than the last. Beneath it he had scratched a single word: enough.

You take up the peg again. The bell begins. Tonight the moon is a thin paring on the right, and you press the last hole full, dot by dot, until the arc closes and the whole row of them turns grey in the lamplight.