Black moon phase tattoos run in a vertical line down a person's calf, with a pink strappy sandal visible at the foot.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Moon phases down a calf

Calf · Black and grey · Photo

The photograph shows a bare lower leg with a vertical row of seven solid black circles, each shaded as a different moon phase from thin crescent to full disc. The moons are filled with solid black ink and no grey shading, and they step down the leg in a gentle curve. The soft, slightly warm-toned photo shows pale skin, a pale bed sheet, and a pink sandal with a wooden block heel at the bottom of the frame.

Calf Moon Moon phase Crescent Circle Celestial

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The rain had come in sideways across the car park by the time I got the shutter up, and Mr Akers was standing under the awning with his cap dripping, glaring at the paint tin as though it had cheated him. He taught me the moons the first winter I worked the stall. Start thin, he said, and grow them fat, and never shade them. Grey is for people who want to be forgiven for something. We painted them up the left upright of the board in black enamel, one a week, a little lower each time so the row crept down the post like it was walking somewhere.

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He didn't come in on Tuesday. His wife, Maureen, brought his brushes round in a carrier bag and said he'd asked for the last one to be done properly, and that he'd know if it wasn't. I told her I'd do my best. She laughed at that, which I hadn't expected, and said he'd always said the same thing about his own work.

So I stood on the crate in the drizzle with the lamp from the fish stall spilling yellow across the wet tarmac, and I painted the full moon at the bottom of the post, round as a coin, the ink sinking into the grain of the wood. When I stepped back, the rain was already beading on the black, sitting in each disc like a small dark pond. I left it there. Maureen can have the brushes back on Friday, and I'll tell her the moons are finished, which is true, and that the sixth one is still a bit fat, which is true too.