Black and grey realism tattoo of a vertical row of moon phases, from crescent to full moon, on the upper arm.

Moon phases down the upper arm

Realism · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A vertical row of seven moon phases runs along the outer upper arm, moving from a thin crescent at the top to a full moon in the middle and back to a crescent at the bottom. Each moon is shaded in soft grey with fine detail in the craters and surface texture. The arm is shown against a plain pale wall, with a white vest top and a hand resting across the forearm.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, the lot of you, and mind the cold stone at your backs, because this is the part where the old ones lost their nerve. Seven nights before the harvest, the miller's girl Hester walked out past the last oak at Pell Hollow with a loaf under her arm and a question in her mouth, and the moon came down the hill to meet her.

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It was only a paring that night, a thin white nail of a thing. 'Are you the one they call the Paring?' Hester asked, and it said it was, and that it was hungry. So she broke her bread in two and gave it the larger half. The moon ate, and as it ate it grew, and it made her a bargain. Each evening she would stand at the edge of the wheat and say its name aloud, and it would fill out a little more, rung by rung, like a ladder being climbed. But it had to empty too, or it would split the sky open like a ripe plum.

She kept her side for a week. The moon rose full over the wood and the whole village came out to see it, and Hester grew proud and then tired of standing in the wheat with her mouth open. On the eighth night she stayed in bed and did not say a word. The moon waited, then began to slip down the sky, one rung each night, shrinking as it went, until it hung over the churchyard as thin as a fingernail.

Hester woke to the blackbirds, ran out in her nightdress with the heel of yesterday's loaf, and found the moon caught on the lych gate. It was so small she had to hold her breath to see it. 'I'm sorry,' she told it, and it said nothing, but it took the bread. So if you see it go thin over the wood, don't be frightened. It's only walking back down the stairs, counting its steps the way she taught it. Now off to bed, and somebody fetch the lamp before I tell you about the fox.

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