Black and grey fine line tattoo of a row of moon phases across the upper back, seen from behind on a woman with dark hair pulled to one side.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Moon phases tattoo across the upper back

Fine line · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A row of eight small moon phases runs horizontally across the upper back, from a thin crescent on the left to a thin crescent on the right, with the full moon near the centre. The phases are drawn with fine outlines and soft grey shading, with the darkest moon at the middle. The plain white background and the cream lace top keep the focus on the tattoo.

Fine line Back Moon Moon phase Crescent Full moon Circle

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lamp at Scarrow Head had been lit by hand for forty years, and the logbook still wanted the moon written in every night before the wick was trimmed. Ida Penhallow kept it in pencil because ink ran in the damp. On the first Tuesday of March she wrote waxing crescent, a sliver no thicker than a fingernail paring, and then sat a while with the kettle ticking as it cooled.

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Her nephew had come up the cliff path with a sack of coal and a letter from the council. Nobody at Scarrow was to be kept on past the autumn, the letter said, the light being automated from Michaelmas. He read it standing in the doorway and did not take off his cap. Ida told him the moon would be half by Saturday and he should mind the rocks on the north side, where the tide came round faster than a man could walk.

On Saturday the moon was half, a clean white edge against the dark, and she climbed the iron stairs to check the mantle one last time. The lens threw its beam out over the water in long bars, and for a moment the light and the moon looked like two lamps side by side, each keeping watch on the other.

She wrote the entry that night in pencil: first quarter, cloud to the west, lamp burning. Then she drew, very small in the margin, the eight phases in a row, from thin crescent to full and back to thin, the way she had been taught by a keeper who had been taught by someone before him. The full one she shaded darkest, so the page would remember which night had been the brightest.