Two bare feet with black and grey tattoos: a row of planets, including Saturn, on the left ankle and a column of moon phases on the right ankle.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Planets and moon phases on two ankles

Ankle · Black and grey · Photo

Two bare feet are shown side by side. The left foot has a descending column of small planet-like circles, with one ringed planet resembling Saturn, ending in a larger shaded sphere near the heel. The right foot has a vertical row of moon phases, shaded from dark at the bottom to lighter circles at the top. The ink is black and grey, with fine outlines and soft shading, set against a plain background.

Ankle Planet Saturn Moon phase Solar system Moon

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Brother Oswin, the Easter tables are wrong again, and the abbot has sent me up the tower with a lamp, a stylus and a stool that wobbles. Below me the fens lie flat and silver under the moon, and I am meant to say whether she is waxing or waning before the bell for matins. I have counted the moon every night for eleven years, and still I begin each count with a small prayer that I will not confuse the two halves of her.

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On the chapter-house wall Brother Piran has painted the wanderers in red lead and ochre: Mercury no bigger than a barley grain, Jupiter with its four moons pinned about it like buttons, and Saturn with its ring drawn so thin that the abbot once asked whether it was a crack in the plaster. Piran took the design from a letter that came up the river from Venice, and he would not let anyone correct the ring. "It is not wrong," he said. "It is only not yet believed."

Each dawn I copy my night's count into the ledger beside his painted sky, shading a disc darker for every night the moon grows toward full. This morning the disc at the foot of the column was the one I had been dreading, the moon gone entirely from the sky, and the abbot came to read over my shoulder. He said nothing about the tables. He only pointed to the margin where Piran had drawn, years ago, a small brown sphere with a cross on it, and asked me, quite gently, which of us was standing on it. I wrote the count, and beneath it I wrote the one thing I was sure of: that we had all been standing on the same dark ground.