Black and grey tattoo design of seven moon phases stacked in a vertical column on a white card, shown on white fur.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Seven moon phases in a vertical column

Black and grey · Flash

Seven moon phases are arranged in a vertical line, running from a thin crescent at the top to a full moon in the middle and back to a crescent at the bottom. Each moon is filled with soft grey shading and fine surface detail, with the darker shadowed edges giving them volume. The design sits centred on a plain white square card against a fluffy white background.

Moon Moon phase Crescent moon Full moon

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The cook on the Marjorie Lund kept the tally on the underside of the pantry shelf, and by the third week out of Hull nobody aboard could say who had started it. Each night I drew the moon in carbon pencil, one phase beneath the last, so the column ran from a paper-thin crescent at the top down to a full moon in the middle and back to a sliver at the bottom. The skipper, Haskett, read it over his tea like a timetable. When the full moon came, he said, we were halfway, and the men would stop counting the days to the Tyne and start counting the pints they'd buy.

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The weather turned on the thirty-first night. A wave came green over the rail and through the galley hatch, and by morning the water had lifted the pencil off the shelf in a grey smear. The full moon was nothing but a dirty thumbprint. Pell, the second mate, stood in the doorway with his oilskins still dripping and looked at it for a long time. He didn't say a word, and neither did I, because he had a daughter in Grimsby who drew the same moons on her school jotter and he knew better than to ask me to redraw them.

I wiped the shelf dry with my sleeve and drew the full moon again, pressing harder this time so the lead bit into the wood. Then I went back to the bottom of the column and drew the last crescent a little thicker than the rest. It wasn't a moon. It was the handle of the kettle, the one we'd lost overboard in the squall, and it hung there under the phases like a question nobody had asked yet.