Black and grey dotwork moon tattoo on the upper arm near the elbow, with a thin fine line curving on the forearm below.

Small shaded moon on an upper arm

Dotwork · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A small, round moon is tattooed on the upper arm just above the elbow, with craters and a highlight picked out in dense dots and soft grey shading. Below the elbow on the forearm, a single thin curved line runs diagonally down the skin. The photograph is shot against a plain pale wall with a leafy plant at the lower left and a dark t-shirt sleeve at the top.

Dotwork Fine line Upper arm Forearm Moon Crater Curved line Arc

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The landlady at Marrow House charges an extra shilling for a room facing the sea, and you pay it without argument, because from that window the moon rises over the breakwater every night like a coin someone is slowly lifting out of the water. Mrs Pellow keeps a brass telescope in the hall cupboard under a moth-eaten tablecloth. It belongs to the house, she says, not the guests, which is why you have to ask, and why she always wants to know what you saw.

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By the third week you know the moon's phases the way you know the lodgers' footsteps on the stairs. The commercial traveller in number four comes in late every night, smelling of salt and tobacco. You sit on the sill with a cup of tea gone cold and copy the craters onto notepaper from a library book: Tycho, Copernicus, Plato. You shade them with a pencil until the paper goes soft and grey, and you pretend it is a map of somewhere you could actually go.

On the night of the full moon, Mrs Pellow lets you carry the telescope up to the leads. The lens is cold and smells of machine oil. Through it the moon stops being a coin and becomes a dusty stone full of pits, with one bright point near the rim that she tells you is a crater still fresh from being struck. "Everything out there got hit once," she says, "and kept going anyway." You don't ask whether she means the moon.

On the Monday the traveller's room is empty, his key hanging on its hook with a folded note tucked beneath. It says only that he has gone down the coast on the early train, and that the moon is better from a distance. You take the pencil from the sill and, under the craters, draw one thin curve from the breakwater up toward the empty sky. You leave it unfinished, the way a line runs out when someone stops walking.