Small black and grey shaded circle resembling a moon, tattooed on the upper arm below a dark sleeve.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Small shaded moon on upper arm

Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A small round disc is shaded in grey, darker at the edge and lighter towards the centre, with a pale highlight that suggests a moon or planet with craters. A thin, single curved line sits lower on the arm near the elbow. The ink is black and grey, photographed against a plain pale wall with a blurred green plant at the lower left.

Upper arm Moon Planet Circle Crater

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Pass the bread across, Maud, and mind the crust, for this is the tale of the lamplighter's daughter who climbed the tower stairs of Harrowmere every night to trim the great glass lamp. The town below was dark and quarrelsome, and the people paid her in eggs and mended boots, but she never once complained, because up in that tower the whole sky came close enough to touch.

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One winter the sea fog rolled so thick that the ships could not find the harbour, and the mayor came puffing up the steps demanding the lamp be turned higher. Higher, he said, as if light were a thing you could simply pile on. The girl looked at the old brass wheel and then at the pale grey disc hanging over the water, round and cratered and wearing its one bright spot like a bruise gone silver. She told him the moon would do more for them than any flame of hers, if only folk would look up and stop grumbling about the cold.

The mayor laughed and called her a dreamer, and went back down to his supper. But the girl sat with her cold tea and watched the moon drag its shadow across the fog, and before dawn she had a notion so mad that the sailors still argue about it in the taverns. She climbed out on the gallery rail, held up her looking glass, and flashed the moonlight straight down the channel, three long beams and three short, until a fishing boat answered with a lantern from the reef.

And that, my dears, is why the lamp at Harrowmere has a silver mirror behind it to this day, and why the children of the town still tell the mayor's joke about the moon being a dreamer's lamp. Now off you go, the candle's nearly out.