Close photo of a forearm with a black ink sequence of moon phases running down the inner arm, with bracelets on the wrist and sand in the background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Moon phases down the forearm

Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A forearm is raised against sandy ground, with a row of solid black moon phase shapes running from the wrist towards the elbow. The crescents and near-full discs are simple, flat silhouettes with no shading or fine detail. Stacked bracelets and a pale sunlit tone sit above the tattoo, and the lighting is warm.

Forearm Moon Moon phase Crescent Bracelet Sand

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Orrin Vance kept the moon for the whole barque. Every night at four bells he climbed to the poop with a stub of chalk and a slate, and drew the thing as it stood in the sky, a sliver or a half or a fat white plate, then wrote the date beside it in a hand like barbed wire. The rest of us thought it fussy. The captain thought it sound practice for a navigator, and the cook swore a man who watched the moon would never be caught out by a spring tide.

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I was nineteen and sick of being told what I already knew. Off the bar at Lagos I took the slate while he slept and rubbed out a week of his marks, drawing my own shapes over them. A full moon where the sky was new. A crescent fat as a ham. When he woke he looked at it a long time without speaking, then handed me back the chalk and said the sea had no patience for corrections made in bed.

We ran into the doldrums with the water like poured lead, and for nine days there was no wind and no moon either, only cloud. On the tenth night it tore open over the bows, and there was a sliver low in the west, thin as a fingernail, exactly where his chalk had put it a week before. I had drawn it wrong. He had not.

By the time we raised the Nore he had the phases inked down his own forearm, a row of solid black moons from wrist to elbow, each one the shape of a night he had recorded. He never mentioned it and neither did I. I still have the slate in my kitbag, and the last thing on it, in my own clumsy chalk, is the sliver I got right.