Black and grey fine line crescent moon tattoo on the side of an ankle, photographed in black and white.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Small crescent moon on an ankle

Fine line · Ankle · Black and grey · Photo

A small crescent moon outline is tattooed on the side of a bare foot and ankle, shown in a black and white photograph. The thin, dark linework is neat and simple, with a little shading inside the curve. The soft light falls across the skin, and the tattoo sits near the centre of the frame against a plain, blurred background.

Fine line Ankle Crescent moon Moon

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dad never let anyone weed the moon bed before dark. It sat at the bottom of the back garden behind the water butt, a crescent of white pinks and night-scented stock that he'd laid out with a length of hosepipe and a great deal of swearing. By day it looked like nothing much. Come dusk, the flowers opened all at once, and the whole curve glowed like a light someone had forgotten to switch off.

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The summer I was twelve, the Pelling boy from next door trampled the curve chasing a cricket ball. Dad didn't shout. He knelt in the dirt with his trowel and spent an hour lifting every bruised stem, wrapping the roots in wet newspaper and setting them back a fraction straighter. 'They'll sulk for a week,' he said. 'Then they'll forgive us.' He never once mentioned the ball.

Some nights he sat on the back step with a flask and pointed out that the lit part of the moon always faced the sun, as if the sky were simply too polite to show its unfinished side. I used to think that was the saddest thing I'd ever heard. Now I think it was the kindest, because it meant the dark part was still there, just not on show.

When the stock came up the following July, I cut the first bloom and pressed it between the pages of his old atlas, at the page for the Atlantic. He'd have liked that. The bed is still there, and every dusk I stand on the step and watch it open, pale against the black earth, as the sky goes out above it.