Black and grey fine line tattoo of seven moon phases in a curved row across the upper back of a person with short blonde hair.

Moon phases across the upper back

Fine line · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A row of seven moon phases runs across the upper back, from thin crescents at each end to a full moon at the centre. The outlines are fine and dark, and the craters are shaded with stippled dots and patches of grey. The photograph is taken from behind on a bed with soft, blurred light, so the tattoo is the sharpest detail in the frame.

Fine line Back Moon Moon phase Crescent moon Full moon Crater

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Brother Anselm will not let you touch the astrolabe until you can draw the phases from memory, so you sit at the scriptorium table with a pot of iron-gall ink and a sheet of vellum that still smells of the goat it came from. Seven moons, he says, is the number the old tables allow for a fortnight's turning, if you count the thin ones at the edges as their own. You draw the crescent first, a fingernail paring, then the half, then the swelling gibbous, and you stop at the full, because Anselm insists it must be drawn last or the whole row sits crooked on the page.

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The full moon is the hard one. Your first attempt looks like a lump of cheese, so he takes the pen from your hand and stipples it himself, dot by dot, until the seas and craters rise grey like breath on a window. "The moon has no weather," he says, "so every mark on her is a record of something that struck her." You are fourteen and that sounds like a sermon, and you tell him so, and he laughs until the candle gutters in its dish.

Weeks later the messenger from the bishop's house arrives asking why the Easter reckoning is a day out. You open the book to the margin where your row of seven moons sits, and you see the mistake at once: the waning crescent was drawn one phase too early, the error of someone who wanted the night to come sooner. You correct it in red ink and say nothing to Anselm, who would only tell you that the moon forgives everything except haste.