Colour and grey tattoo across a shoulder blade showing a yellow moon, a spiral hill, two silhouetted figures, a graveyard fence and carved pumpkins.

Moon, spiral hill and pumpkins on a back

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A large tattoo covers the upper back and shoulder blade, centred on a yellow moon with two black silhouetted figures standing on a swirling spiral hill. Below, a dark grey hillside holds a graveyard fence, rows of small rounded headstones and several pumpkins with carved faces. The soft grey smoke-like shading contrasts with the bright yellow moon, and the wrapping spiral leads the eye across the composition.

Back Shoulder Moon Spiral Silhouette Pumpkin Graveyard Hill Cloud

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mind the proving trays, love, and sit yourself down on the flour sacks where it's warm. You'll not hear this told sober by the milk cart men, so I'll tell it you now, while the ovens still tick and the sky over the mill is black as a burnt crust. It was the winter my mother's oven cracked, the winter the moon came up yellow as a lemon peel over Hollow Mere and stuck there, and the whole town could hear the hill groaning on its spiral.

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The fellow came down at the turn of the night, all knees and elbows in a striped coat mended more times than my apron. He had a face like a tallow candle and a long grin, and he stood at our back step with his hat in both hands like a man come to ask for a post. 'Everything up there is round,' he said. 'The hill, the moon, the bones of the fence. Nothing sits square. Could a body get a loaf that's proper flat, for a change?' My mother gave him a square tin loaf and a pie cut from the orchard pumpkins, and he wept into the cloth like a boy.

He came back every night after that, and the pumpkins on the hill grew carved faces that grinned at our window until the frost painted them over. He took to baking himself, badly, ruining three trays with his long fingers, until one dawn he set a loaf on the sill shaped like the moon, scorched at one edge, and said it had come out right at last.

When the milk cart rattled up at six, the hill was bare, the moon had gone pale as paper, and a line of flour footprints ran up the frost to the top of the spiral. Mother said he'd gone back to his graveyard to sleep. I kept the loaf. It's the one on the top shelf, love. I'm not telling you it's the best I've ever baked, but it's the only one that ever came out round.