Fine line black ink tattoo of a small crescent moon with a simple face on the inner ankle of a leg in soft sunlight.

Small crescent moon on an ankle

Fine line · Ankle · Black and grey · Photo

A small crescent moon with a simple face in its curve sits on the ankle of a leg resting in warm, dappled sunlight. The thin, single-weight black linework is delicate, with no shading and no fill. The rest of the image shows soft skin tones, a shadowed knee and a cream fabric in the lower right, with the tattoo as the clear focal point.

Fine line Ankle Moon Crescent moon Face

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mrs Okonedo kept the bakery on Tanner Lane because her father had, and his father before him, and none of them had ever slept past the hour the street lamps went out. So when a crescent moon came down the flue one February, sooner than the first batch was proving, she was the only soul awake to see it.

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It settled on the cooling rack like a dropped coin, and a face showed in its curve, thin and sour as a child kept out of the pantry. It said it had been walking since the last tide and had not eaten since. Mrs Okonedo told it the flour was promised to the milk carts. The moon said the carts could wait, and she found she had already torn the heel from yesterday's tin loaf and set it beside the moon, which ate in small, careful bites, the way the old women ate at a wake.

After that it came every night the sky was dark, and every night she saved the heel. Some mornings the moon was fat and her dough rose under the cloth without a prod. Other mornings it was a sliver and the loaves sat flat as pancakes, and she knew it had been short of bread. She began baking a little extra, a small round loaf with a cut across the top, and the moon took that one whole.

One morning in March the rack was bare and the sill was empty. She stood in the doorway with her apron over her arm and watched the carts go past, and the sky above the rooftops was pale and empty too. Then she looked down at the step and found a single crumb of crust, shaped like a fingernail, that had not been there before. She kept it on the windowsill for the rest of her life.