Pentagram and moon symbols on two fingers

Dougal Macrae had the Constance out of Eyemouth for thirty years, and he never once put to sea without the ring. Not a wedding ring. A tin ring his mother cut from the lid of a biscuit box, with a star stamped in the middle and a moon scratched over it. Every man on the boat wore one on the smallest finger of the left hand, and his mate Ruaraidh wore a cross beneath his, for the lads gone down off Bass Rock. Nobody asked about the eye. The eye was Dougal's own notion, painted on the bow where the sea could see it.

The autumn of the great blow they came round the point with the lamps swinging and the hull groaning like an old cow. Ruaraidh grabbed the wheel with a hand that would not stop shaking, and Dougal saw the rings catch the lantern light, one after another, all the way along the rail. Seven men. Seven small tin moons. He counted them the way you'd count stitches on a sock, and every time he reached the end he began again.

They came in at dawn with the nets empty and the bow stove in, but every finger was accounted for. The next morning Dougal went down to the harbour wall and found a bit of driftwood with an eye burned into it, its paint run down like it had been crying. He took it home and kept it on the mantel, and that is the only thing in this house that has never once been wet.