Small black and grey tattoo of a vertical row of moon phases, from crescent to full, along the inner forearm near the wrist.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Moon phases down the inner forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A vertical column of eight small moon phases runs down the inner forearm, moving from a thin crescent at the top to a full moon in the middle and back to a crescent near the wrist. The moons are rendered with fine outlines and soft grey shading, with the shaded areas showing the lit and unlit parts of each phase. The tattoo is in black and grey on pale skin, set against a dark, softly blurred background with the hand visible at the bottom of the frame.

Fine line Forearm Moon Moon phase Crescent Full moon

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The ferry at Haddon Ford ran on the same iron rope for longer than anyone in the village could say, and Tom Pell had never let the moon hurry him across it. He kept his own count on a strip of ash nailed inside the shed door, one cut for every night, and his father had kept it before him. When the moon was a thread he rowed the Hollins sisters over with their bicycles and their wet shopping. When it was full he tied up and drank tea in the shed, because the river rose on full moons and took whatever was out on it.

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His daughter Nell did not believe in the river rising. She was seventeen and worked the telephone exchange in the market town, and she came down to the landing one October evening with a lamp she did not need, asking why a grown man would sit out a whole week for a bit of light. Tom did not answer her. He pushed off with the pole and the lamp swung on its hook, and somewhere out on the brown water a voice called her name in her mother's tone, though her mother had been dead nine years.

"Mind the rope," he said, and that was the whole of the lesson. Halfway over the cloud broke and the moon came out as a paring at the edge of the sky, and Nell saw the river was no higher than it had been at noon. She understood then that the cuts on the door were not for the water. They were for the nights a man could be called and was not required to answer.

They went back up the bank with the lamp turned low. In the morning Nell took her father's knife and cut a notch of her own beside his, a little deeper, and said nothing about it.