Black ink tattoo of a crescent moon, stars and a cross running vertically across the top of a bare foot, with red toenail polish.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Moon, stars and cross on a foot

Other · Black and grey · Photo

A bare foot with red painted toenails shows a vertical column of black ink symbols across the top of the foot, including a crescent moon, a small star, a stylised circular mark, a dot and a cross at the base. The linework is solid and bold with flat black fill and no visible shading. The ink is the only colour in the tattoo, set against pale skin and a green carpet in an informal snapshot.

Other Moon Crescent Star Cross Circle Dot Symbol Foot

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lambing shed smells of wet straw and paraffin, and the lamp is the only light for a mile. You have the tally book open on the feed bin with a pencil stub between your teeth, because your gloves are soaked through and Dad has gone down the lane to fetch the vet, who never comes before dawn. Ewe seven is down in the far pen, groaning low, and you already know the count will not come out right.

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You have been keeping the marks since October. A crescent for every night the wind came off the Cheviots, a small star for each lamb that stood up unaided, a circle for every ewe you named after your mother's sisters. The cross you saved for the ones that never drew breath. At the foot of the page sits a single dot, which you made the morning the frost cracked the water trough, and nobody on the farm has ever asked you why it mattered.

Ewe seven delivers a ewe lamb, slick and silent. You rub her with straw and count one breath, two, three, and then she sneezes against your wrist. Your hand shakes so badly that the star comes out crooked, but you draw it anyway, then the moon above it, because the sky through the rafters has cleared and the sheep have gone quiet at last.

Crossing the yard afterwards, your breath hangs white in front of you. Under your coat the book presses against your ribs, and when you open it under the porch light the marks read like a ladder climbing from the cross to the moon. You close the book and leave the dot alone. It is the one mark you have never been able to explain, and tonight you decide that is allowed.