Hand with four small dotwork moon phase tattoos in black and grey, one on each finger, set against a backdrop of bones and a glass candle jar.

Moon phases tattooed across four fingers

Dotwork · Hand · Black and grey · Photo

Four small circular moon phases sit one per finger, from a thin crescent on the index finger through a half moon and a gibbous shape to a near full moon on the little finger. Each moon is built from fine stippled dots, with heavier dotting on the shadowed edges and lighter areas left as bare skin. The ink is black and grey, and the blurred background of bones, moss and a glass jar fills the frame behind the hand.

Dotwork Hand Moon Moon phase Crescent moon Full moon Finger

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lift on ward six had stuck again, so Nadia took the stairs with a tray of saline under one arm and her torch clipped to her lapel. By the second landing her thumb had found the moons on her fingers the way it always did when her hands needed something to do. Thin crescent on the index. Half on the middle. The ring finger's gibbous swelling like a held breath. The little finger's near-full disc, which she had always thought the most honest of the four, because it so nearly got there.

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Sister Brannigan looked up from the desk as the fire doors sighed shut. 'Bed fourteen's awake. Mr Pryce wants to know if the tide's in.' Nadia found him propped on three pillows, his oxygen tube hooked over his ears, staring at the blank black square of the window. He had kept the light at Corran Head for thirty-one years and still woke at the hours the tide turned. 'I can't tell you about the tide,' she said, checking the line in his wrist. 'But it's dark out and the moon's a thin one.'

'Waxing, then,' he said. 'Full on Thursday. My Edna never missed it.' He tried to lift his hand toward the window and the effort set him coughing. Nadia caught his fingers and held them up against the glass, so the lamp from the car park fell across his knuckles and her own. 'Which one's the full one?' he asked. She tapped the little finger. He squinted at it for a long time, then nodded, as if a light had been confirmed somewhere out on the water.

She stayed until the drip ran clear and his breathing slowed. When she finally went back down the corridor she kept her hand flat against the window as she passed, the near-full moon nearest the glass, the way she would have left a lamp burning for someone still out there.