Black and white photo of a black and grey tattoo of five moon phases running down a person's spine on the back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Moon phases tattoo along the spine

Back · Black and grey · Photo

A bare back shows a vertical row of five moon phases, from crescents at the top and bottom to a full moon in the centre with half-moon shapes between. The moons are shaded in black and grey, with the full moon showing surface texture and the crescents appearing more solid. The black and white photograph is framed closely on the back, with a white shirt pulled over one shoulder against a dark background.

Back Moon Moon phase Crescent Full moon Spine

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The signal box at Hollin Cross had a calendar pinned beside the lever frame, and Maud Pelling had marked every night in red pencil since her father's stroke. Five phases, she told the stationmaster, were all the moon ever did before it came round again, and the Carlisle express never ran late on a bright night, so she only needed to watch the sky for the one that mattered. Her father had taught her that by the paraffin lamp, his finger tracing the sliver on the window glass.

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The goods from Settle came through at quarter past two, and on the third night of the new moon a boy from the ballast gang climbed the steps with a message that the down line was blocked at Ribblehead. Maud did not panic. She pulled the board, wrote the times in the book, and walked out onto the platform with her lamp held low so the driver could see her face and the white of her hand. The moon above the fells had swelled into a half, then a full pale coin, and she thought of her father saying the moon kept no secrets from people who looked at it honestly.

The driver stopped with his brakes hissing a yard from the buffers. Afterwards he said he had seen nothing but a woman standing in a circle of light on an empty platform, as steady as a lamp post. Maud went back to the box, took up the pencil, and drew a fresh crescent in the margin of the calendar, thin as a fingernail, waiting for the sky to come back to it.