Black and grey photograph of a vertical column of moon phase tattoos running down the side of a bare ribcage, in blackwork style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Moon phases tattoo down the ribs

Blackwork · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A bare torso in side view shows a vertical column of ten circular moon phase motifs running down the side of the ribs. The phases range from full dark discs to crescent and half-lit shapes, drawn with solid black fills and fine outlines. The image is black and grey, with soft, low lighting, a draped fabric at the top left and a waistband at the bottom.

Blackwork Geometric Ribs Moon Moon phase Circle Crescent Celestial

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Now then, sit yourself down by the range, lad, and mind the coal dust on that chair. My grandmother ran the lamp room at Ashworth Drift for forty years, and she never once let a man go down without knowing what the sky was doing above him.

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Every morning she chalked the moon on the board by the lamp hooks. Dark first, a black ring with nothing in it. Then the thin silver horn, then the half, then the full round face that made the young lads whistle. She said the moon pulled the water up through the seams, and a collier who ignored the sky would one day find the roof moving over his head.

The winter of the flood, the chalk ran out halfway through the cycle. She drew the rest with a burnt stick on the back of an old pay packet, the dark phases pressed so heavy they shone like wet slate. Nobody argued with her after that. Six men came up that week who would otherwise have gone down on the Thursday shift, and not one of them could say why.

When she died, they found the board wiped clean except for one dark circle at the bottom, scored so hard it had gone clean through the wood. My father asked her once why she always finished on the dark. She said that was when you could see the stars, and the stars never needed filling.