Black and grey tattoo of a vertical column of moon phase circles running down a person's back along the spine.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Moon phases down the spine

Geometric · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A column of circles runs down the centre of a bare back, each showing a different moon phase from crescent to near full. The circles are filled with solid black and pale grey, with clean outlines and simple shading. The photograph is black and white, framed closely on the back with long dark hair falling over one shoulder and a soft blurred background.

Geometric Back Moon phase Moon Circle Column

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Your father kept the almanac in the wheelhouse drawer, under the tide tables, and he never once consulted it for the weather. He read the moon instead. Every page carried a column of small circles pencilled down the margin, and he shaded each one with the side of his thumb as the nights passed, dark at the new, pale at the half, until the full stood round and white above the harbour wall. When the circles filled, the fish came in on the flood. That was his whole creed, and the Dorothy Mary, forty feet of tarred oak, had lived by it for thirty years.

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You learned the rhythm before you learned to swim. Eleven boats worked out of Porthkennack that autumn, and you rode the quay with a torch and a flask of tea, counting the crescent nights off on your fingers while the men hauled crates. Mr Penhallow said the sea did not care for almanacs. The boys said you would end up as wrong as the wireless men. You kept counting anyway, because the numbers were the one thing on that quay that never shouted back.

The night the wind backed north-east, your father stood at the wheelhouse window and looked at the moon for a long time. Half of it was already gone. He reached for the pencil, then stopped and held it out to you instead. Draw it, he said. Show me where the fish will be. You shaded the next circle with the side of your thumb, then the one after, the way he had taught you, and when you looked up the sky had gone the colour of slate and the other boats were already turning for home.

They were back before the squall. Nobody spoke of the margin again, but the almanac sits on your own kitchen shelf now, and each month you still pencil the thirteen circles down its edge, waiting for the water to stand high enough to bring the boats home.