Black and grey realism tattoo of a sequence of moon phases running down the inside of a forearm against a cloudy sky.

Moon phases sequence on a forearm

Realism · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A raised forearm and hand are photographed against a pale cloudy sky. A vertical row of seven moon phases runs along the forearm, from a thin crescent near the wrist to a fuller crescent lower down, each shaded with soft grey gradients and fine surface texture. The moons are shown in black and grey ink, with the forearm lit evenly and the background kept neutral.

Realism Forearm Moon Moon phase Crescent Sky Cloud

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The snow had shut the Crowmere road on the third day of December, and by the seventh the landlady had stopped pretending the guests would leave. Edie Harrow kept the ledger in the back parlour, a thick book with a pencil ribbon, and every night before she banked the fire she drew a small circle beside the date and shaded it with her thumb.

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The moon had been full when the coach came in, a white coin over the drifts. Since then it had thinned. Mr Okafor, the surveyor trapped with his maps, found her at the window on the ninth and asked why she bothered. She said her grandmother had done it, and her grandmother's mother before that, and the book went back to a year nobody could read without a lamp held close.

On the twelfth night the moon was a sliver, a thin paring above the coach house, and Edie realised she had been reading the book the wrong way round. The first page began with a waxing crescent in an old hand. Each year someone had started at the new moon and worked towards the full, and she had been turning the pages as if the sky were going dark. She sat with the pencil, turned back to the start, and began again from the beginning of the cycle.

By morning a carter's team had cleared the road, and the surveyor left with his maps rolled under his arm. Edie wrote the last entry in the margin, a small full circle. Then, because snow still lay along the sill and nobody had come to shovel the step, she drew the next crescent in the same careful pencil, already waiting to be filled in.