Black and grey fine line tattoo of a mountain range with a crescent moon on the back of a person's neck, with dark hair tied up.

Mountain range and crescent moon on the neck

Fine line · Neck · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows a jagged mountain range with a small crescent moon above the peaks, drawn in thin black outlines with light shading on the faces of the mountains. The work is in black ink only, and the design sits horizontally across the back of the neck, above the shoulders. The black and white photograph is taken from behind and frames the design against bare skin, with the hair pulled up and a patterned top visible below.

Fine line Neck Mountain Moon Crescent moon Landscape

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The surveyors had argued for three days about which peak was the true top of the range, and by the fourth evening Nell had stopped listening and started keeping her own count. Ten jagged shoulders stood against the western sky, pale on their sunward faces and dark where the shadow pooled in the folds. Above them the new moon hung thin as a fingernail paring, and Mr Adair swore it was a bad omen for the chain.

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Nell's job was to carry the theodolite case up the scree and hold the ranging pole steady while the men squinted. She did not believe in omens. She believed in the crescent because it came only for a few nights a month and then went off somewhere else, and nobody had ever asked it to measure anything. On the fourth night she drew it in the back of her ledger, a curved line above a ragged row of triangles, shading the slopes where the light fell away.

Adair found the drawing in the morning and laughed, then stopped laughing when he saw she had put the peaks in the wrong order. "The highest is the one nearest the moon," she said. "That's how you tell in the dark." He wanted to argue, but his figures had been wrong twice already, and the moon had gone behind the eastern ridge without a word.

When they packed the instruments that week, the chain was recorded as eleven peaks, not ten. Nobody in the office in Edinburgh ever asked why the eleventh had no name. Nell never told them she had named it after the moon, the only thing up there that had never once needed a survey.