Close-up of a small fine line crescent moon with a blue star and faint radiating lines, tattooed on the inner wrist of a raised hand.

Small crescent moon and star on wrist

Fine line · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A small crescent moon sits on the inner wrist, with a tiny blue four-pointed star inside its curve and two faint sparkle lines extending from it. The crescent is shaded in dark grey and black with fine, delicate linework, and the blue star is the only colour. The image is a close, centred shot of the hand held up against a dark wooden floor, with a silver ring on one finger and a metal watch on the wrist.

Fine line Forearm Moon Crescent Star Sparkle

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The sign had come down in the gale on Tuesday, and by Thursday the chemist's widow had sent for me, because nobody else on Dock Street would climb a ladder to a tin moon. Edna Pell had kept her husband's shop shut for a fortnight after the funeral and then opened it again without a word about the sign. It lay face down in the yard among the pigeon feathers, a crescent of painted tin with a hole punched in its hollow where a star should sit.

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The star was the trouble. Walter Pell had set it there himself, a sliver of blue glass cut from a bottle his father brought back from Rotterdam, and it came to a point like a needle. Edna wanted it back exactly as it had been. I spent the morning with a pot of cement and a pair of tweezers, working the glass into the notch while she stood in the doorway with her arms folded, counting the trams.

When I finally fixed the sign to its bracket, the afternoon light came through the blue and threw a small cold spark across the pavement, with two thin lines of it running off towards the river like the ends of a compass needle. Edna looked up for a long time. 'He used to say it was the only star that never moved,' she said. 'Mind the cement on your cuff.'

I walked home along the quay with the ladder on my shoulder and a grey smear on my wrist. Behind me the sign creaked on its bracket, and each time it swung, the blue point caught the lamp in her window and let it go again, as if someone inside were still keeping the way home lit.