Seven black and grey moon phases, from crescent to full and back, arranged in a vertical line on a white card over pale wood.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Moon phases in a vertical row

Black and grey · Flash

A vertical sequence of seven moon phases, from a thin crescent at the top to a full moon in the centre and a crescent at the bottom, drawn in black and grey. The moons have soft grey shading and fine surface texture, and they sit centred on a plain white card photographed on weathered, whitewashed wood.

Moon Moon phase Crescent Full moon Celestial

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Your father taught you to read the moon before he taught you the rota. From the top of the spoil heap at Hollin Pit you could see the whole month laid out above the headgear, and he liked to say the sky kept better time than the colliery ever did. Start with the thin paring low in the west, then the half, then the fat silver coin that threw your shadow down the tips like a dropped coat.

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The winter the company cut the night crew to three, you took the lamp book into the cabin and wrote the moon in the margin every evening, because somebody had to and the deputy thought it daft. Mrs Ashdown from the end terrace brought a flask up the lane at ten, same as she had for your father, and asked after the sky as if it were a neighbour who had gone quiet.

On the night the roof came down at the east drift, the moon was full and so bright you could read the chalk numbers on the cage gates without a lamp. Three men were under the fall. You stood at the winch with your hand on the brake and counted the seconds the way your father counted phases, one for each breath, and when the bell finally rang twice from below you wrote nothing in the book at all.

In the morning the sky had gone thin again, a pale nail paring over the terrace roofs. You opened the book to the margin and drew the phases down the page the way he had shown you, from the crescent to the full and back to the crescent, seven small moons in pencil. Then you wrote the date beside the last one and went home to sleep while the light was still on the hills.