Black fine line tattoo of a column of moon phases running down the centre of a person's back, with dark hair falling over one shoulder.

Moon phases down the spine on a back

Fine line · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A vertical column of circles runs down the centre of the back along the spine, each showing a different moon phase. Thin outlines form the circles, and the lit and shadowed portions are filled with solid black ink. The skin is warm toned and the background is softly blurred, with the tattoo as the clear focus of the composition.

Fine line Back Moon phase Moon Circle Spine Column

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The almanac had been wrong about the fourteenth, and Mr Hebden said so loudly enough for the whole yard to hear. "Waxing gibbous, it says. Look at it. That's a full moon with a bite out of it." He jabbed the page with a pencil stub while the ferry bell clanged across the harbour. I held the lamp steady and didn't argue, because argument with Hebden cost a shilling a minute in lost wages.

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Each night that autumn we went down to the slipway at Cullen Bay with a tin of black ink and a stack of cheap card, and we drew what the sky was doing. Circle by circle. A thin pencil ring first, then the shadowed edge filled in solid, the lit part left as bare paper. Hebden said a sailor who could not read the moon could not read a tide, and a tide misread drowned more men than any gale. I thought he was mostly grumbling. He was never wrong about tides.

By November the cards covered the back of the boathouse door, twenty-nine of them, climbing the grey wood one above another. Someone had asked me once what they were for, and I'd said the almanac. It was a lie that kept things simple. Really they were for the Tuesday his boy failed to come back across the bar, when we sat up on the slip counting nights and waiting for the moon to fill and go back down to nothing.

The boy came in on the new moon, wet to the knees, with a story about a broken oar and a lantern that wouldn't light. Hebden didn't say a word. He took down the last card, turned it over, and wrote a single date on the back in square capitals, the way you'd mark a tally. Then he handed me the ink and said, "Draw the dark one. We'll need it for the next."