Close-up of a small fine line tattoo of a row of moon phases in black ink on the inner forearm, beside an open book.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Moon phases row on forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A row of small black moon phases, from a sliver of crescent through to full and back again, runs across the inner forearm. The linework is fine and the phases are filled solid black with no shading. The arm rests on a dark sleeve and a book on the left, with warm light falling across the skin.

Fine line Forearm Moon phase Moon Crescent Full moon

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Ruth had been chalking the moon onto the inside of the net shed door every night since the Whitsun gales, and by October the sequence ran edge to edge across the planks: a paring sliver, then half, then the great white round of it, then the same again going backwards. Her grandson Owen asked why she bothered when the almanac hung on a nail by the kettle. She said paper was for the bank and the shed was for the boats.

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The Carrick men did not trust the almanac either. It was printed in Glasgow, they said, and Glasgow did not know the tides off this point. What the sea kept was the moon's own rhythm, the pull that drew the water out past the rocks on a spring tide and left the pots dry, and a man who lost count of the phases could walk the causeway at the wrong hour and never walk back. Owen thought this was the kind of thing old people said to keep the young in line, until the night his uncle Davie went out on a black, moonless evening and came home only because somebody had lit the lamp on the point at the right time and kept it burning.

Owen never learned who had lit it. Ruth said she had, then said she had not, then went out to the shed with her chalk, and he understood the question was not hers to answer. When the door finally rotted through, he took the planks off their hinges and cut them into a row of small round discs, each one blacked on the dark side. He nailed them along the harbour wall in order, waxing and waning, so that anyone coming in on a night with no moon could look along the wall and see exactly where the count had got to.