Row of black moon phase tattoos running down a bare calf, with a pale pink shoe visible at the ankle.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Moon phases down a calf

Calf · Black and grey · Photo

A column of eight moon phases, from a thin crescent at the top to a full moon in the middle and a crescent at the bottom, runs diagonally down the back of a bare lower leg. The phases are shown as solid dark circles and crescents with soft shading, in black ink on pale skin. The soft-focus photograph is taken from above, with a pale pink shoe and a neutral bedsheet filling the lower edge of the frame.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit nearer, you lot, and mind the coal dust on that bench. Grandad always said the moon was a lamp some careless god lent the valley, and it dimmed and brightened the way a wick does when the air's bad down the shaft.

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When Nell Pryce's husband went down at Garth Colliery in the winter of the long stoppage, the moon had gone thin as a fingernail. She stood at the back door with her hand on the latch and counted it. One sliver, then a little more, then the half, then the round full thing that lit the slag heaps white as bread. She said it was like watching a man climb a ladder towards the light one rung at a time, then start back down so you never knew which rung he'd reached.

She didn't pray, not at first. She fetched the old tin lamp from under the stairs, filled it with the last of the paraffin, and set it on the sill facing the pit wheel. Every night she trimmed it to match the sky. When the moon was new she turned it low. When it was full she turned it up until the glass ran hot and the kitchen smelt of scorched wick.

The cage came up at last in the grey before morning. Her Tom stepped out black to the eyes, and he looked for the light before he looked for her. He said he'd seen it from a hundred fathoms down, a small yellow moon of its own hanging over the shaft, and that was how he found his way up the stair.

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