Black and grey tattoo of a row of seven moon phases in fine shading across the inner forearm.

Moon phases sequence on a forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A forearm is shown against a black background with a row of seven moon phases tattooed across it, from a thin crescent on the left through partial phases to a full moon in the centre and back to a crescent on the right. The moons are rendered with fine stippled and hatched shading to suggest crater texture and light falloff. The image is in black and grey ink on pale skin, with the tattoo sitting centrally on the arm.

Fine line Realism Forearm Moon Moon phase Crescent Full moon Celestial

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mind the third step, it has been wearing away since before your grandfather was a novice, and nobody has ever had the heart to mend it. Now. You want to hear about Brother Anselm and his moon? Sit by the fire, because it is a long business, counting a thing that will not hold still.

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Anselm kept the slate in the scriptorium at Harrowmere, a grey board the width of a man's arms, and on it he drew seven moons in a row. A thin paring on the left, a half on either side, the round full moon in the middle, and then the waning again to a sliver on the right. Every night he climbed the stair with a lantern, looked up through the slit window, and chalked whichever one the sky was showing him. The Abbot said the Paschal reckoning hung on his chalk, and the brothers said it was a fine thing to be a holy man with nothing better to do than stare at the sky.

Brother Oswin laughed loudest. He said the moon was only a stone with a shadow on it, that the shadow went where it liked, and no chalk would tame it. Anselm only smiled and said that was why he counted.

The winter the lamp oil ran out, the dark came early and stayed. Oswin, sulking, went up the tower one bitter night to prove his point, and found the full moon thinning to nothing, a black bite taking it from one edge. He came down the stair white-faced and did not say a word. Anselm simply took up his chalk and drew the empty circle, then the thin crescent, and wrote beside them the day the sky had gone dark, in the careful hand he had kept for forty years.

Anselm died in spring. The slate is still on the wall. Each month the brothers chalk the sky, and each month the moon comes round again to where it started.