Black and grey realism tattoo of seven moon phases in a row across a person's upper back, from the shoulder blade towards the spine.

Moon phases tattoo across the upper back

Realism · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A row of seven moon phases runs diagonally across the upper back, from a thin crescent near the shoulder to a full moon in the centre and waning crescents towards the spine. The moons are shaded in soft greys with fine texture on the lit surfaces and darker shadowed edges, giving a rounded, three-dimensional effect. The tattoo is shown in black and grey against pale skin, with a dark bra strap and a blurred blue background behind the subject.

Realism Back Moon Moon phase Crescent Full moon Celestial

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Off the Horn the sea went the colour of pewter, and Tomas the cook's boy stopped asking when they would see land. He asked the moon instead. Every night from Lisbon he had climbed to the crosstrees to watch her go, and every night she gave him the same answer: thinner, then thinner still, until she was a paring of silver that slid behind the mizzen and did not come back for three nights.

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The old hands told him the moon was a widow who kept seven houses in the sky, one for each stage of her grief, and that a man who could count them all without looking down would be carried home. Tomas counted with a length of cord, tying one knot at each new moon and one at each full, and by the time they rounded the Cape he had a rope as long as his arm and two crooked fingers from the cold.

In the doldrums a squall came down and split the topsails. The captain lost two men to the boom and the ship drifted with water rising in the hold. Tomas went aloft in the dark with the cord between his teeth. He could not see the horizon, only the moon coming up through torn cloud, round and pale as a plate, and he counted her face the way the widow had taught him, lit side and shadowed side, seven houses to the edge of the world.

When the ship limped into Madeira the cord was frayed to nothing, and the captain asked what he had been doing up there. Tomas shrugged and said he had been keeping the moon's accounts. The widow, the old hands swore afterwards, had kept hers too, and in the last of the light she gave back the thin crescent she had taken from him in the Horn, and he carried it home folded small in his chest.