Black fine line tattoo of five moon phases in a row across the back of a hand, photographed against a dark background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Moon phases on the back of a hand

Fine line · Hand · Black and grey · Photo

A black and white photograph of the back of a hand with the fingers extended, showing a row of five small black moon phase symbols running diagonally from near the wrist towards the knuckles. The moons range from full solid circles to thin crescents, drawn in simple black linework and fill with no further shading. A ring is worn on one finger, and the hand sits against a plain dark background.

Fine line Hand Moon Moon phase Crescent

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Agnes Holm had kept the tide book on the Holy Island causeway for thirty-one years, and in all that time nobody had asked her why she counted the moon. The island's men read the tables printed in the Berwick paper and left it at that. Agnes went out at dusk with a pencil and a tin mug of cold cocoa and drew what the sky was doing, five faces in a row across the top of each page, from the full disc down to the thin paring that would not show until morning.

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Her nephew Tom came over the sands on the second Tuesday of September, soaked to the knee, with a suitcase he had carried from Newcastle and a council letter he did not want to open in front of her. He sat at her kitchen table while the kettle worked up to a shriek. "They want the cottage pulled down before the spring tides," he said. "Say the causeway's going to take it anyway."

She turned the book back to January. Every full moon had its disc filled in solid, every new moon a bare ring, and beside each one she had written the hour the water first covered the stones. "The sea has never once been late," she said. "Not in here."

Tom read until the lamp needed trimming. Then he went out onto the wet sand with the book under his coat, and Agnes followed him as far as the first marker post. The tide turned at twenty to eleven, just where her pencil said it would. Above the Lindisfarne flats a thin crescent hung low over the water, and she tapped its outline on the page with the blunt end of the pencil, the way she had tapped every one of them for three decades, and watched her nephew watch the sea come back over the stones.