Black and grey upper arm tattoo of a handwritten script verse framed around a pale moon, a dark spiral hill and small star sparkles.

Script verse with spiral hill and moon

Lettering · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

The design pairs a block of cursive handwritten text with a pale full moon, a dark spiral hill shaded with soft stippling, and a few small star sparkles around the edges. The lettering is crisp, with bold strokes and fine hairlines, and the hill's spiral is rendered with smooth solid black and grey shading. The tattoo is entirely black and grey and fills a curved area of skin with the text set inside a soft, ragged outline.

Lettering Upper arm Script Text Moon Star Sparkle

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

In the kingdom of Vellen, where the hills were said to have been folded by a careless giant, one hill wound inward like a rope coiled on a deck. Nobody climbed past the first turn, because the old folk said the centre was where the moon came down to rest on wet nights.

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Orla Penhallow, a lamp-trimmer's daughter, did not believe in the moon's resting. She did believe in the boy who sat on the third turn each evening with a ledger and a tin of ink, copying the stars into it one by one. She wrote him a letter on good paper and pinned it under a stone at the foot of the hill, where the grass was worn flat by goats and by nobody else.

The letter asked whether he minded company. She wrote that she would walk the spiral slowly, that she would stop where the path ran out, and that from there they could count the stars together for as long as the lamps burned in Vellen. She signed it with her initials and a small drawn star, because she could not think of anything plainer to add.

His reply came back under the same stone three days later, in the same careful ink. He said he had been counting the wrong stars for years, the ones that were easy to reach, and had only lately noticed the faint pale ones near the moon. Orla climbed the hill that night with a lantern shuttered to a sliver. When she reached the end of the path, the moon was resting where the old folk said it would, and the boy was already sitting there, ledger open on his knee, holding a space in the grass beside him.