Small solid black crescent moon tattoo on the side of a finger, on an open palm photographed in black and white.

Small crescent moon on a finger

Hand · Black and grey · Photo

An open hand is shown palm up, with a small solid black crescent moon tattooed on the side of the middle finger near the palm. The crescent is a simple filled shape with smooth edges and no shading or interior detail. The photograph is monochrome with soft, moody lighting against a dark background, and the hand fills the centre of the frame.

Hand Moon Crescent moon

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The snow had come early to Hollin Fell that year, and by the second week of January the ewes were heavy and restless in the top field. Tom Ashby went out at dusk with a hurricane lamp and his grandmother's flat cap pulled low, counting heads against the wall. One ewe was missing. Her tracks went up the beck and stopped at the broken gate, where the drift had folded over the gap like a sheet.

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His grandmother, Nan Ruth, had told him what the old people did when a beast was lost in winter. You took a coin from the kitchen tin, you cut a thin crescent into the heel of a loaf with the bread knife, and you held your palm open to the sky while you said the moon's name three times. "She'll not take it as a gift," Nan had said, pressing the crust into his hand. "She takes it as a bargain. The moon keeps the nights honest, so you give her a small piece of yourself to hold until the work's done."

He did not believe in it, but he did it anyway, standing at the gate with the bread cold in his fist. The clouds parted over the fell. The moon was a paring of a thing, pale and thin, and the snow took its light and threw it back so the whole valley seemed lit from underneath. Down by the beck a dark shape moved, then another, and there was the ewe, nosing a lamb onto its wobbling legs in a hollow under the thorn.

He carried the lamb home against his chest, its wet wool warm through his jumper. In the kitchen Nan looked at the empty space where the crust had been, then at the lamb, and said nothing at all. Later, when the fire had settled, she took a stub of charcoal from the drawer and marked a small black crescent on the back of the coin tin, the way her own mother had, so the bargain would be kept.