Two people seen from behind lifting their tops, showing a fine line black crescent moon on one back and a fine line sun with a face on the other's side ribs.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Sun and moon tattoos on two backs

Fine line · Back · Black and grey · Photo

Two people are photographed from behind in a narrow hallway, both lifting their tttops to show their bare backs. One has a small crescent moon tattoo on the upper back, and the other has a sun with a human face and rays on the side ribs. The tattoos are in black ink with clean, thin outlines and little or no shading, and the photo is mostly black and white with a red and orange light flare across the hair and right edge.

Fine line Back Ribs Moon Sun Crescent Celestial Face

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lock at Holm Cut was built for one boat at a time, but on the last Thursday of October the Dorothy Ann came down from the north with her hatches still wet, and the Lark Moon was already waiting in the basin with her cabin sides scrubbed so the crescent painted there showed clear as a paring of fingernail. Ruth Penhale stood at the tiller with the rope burning her palm and watched the other steerer, Joss Harrow, lean out over his gate. Neither of them spoke. The lock keeper, Eli Crane, came down the steps with his lantern though it was still daylight, and told them the water was low and the chamber would take only one of them before the next rain.

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Ruth's sun had been painted on the hatch board by her mother the summer before she died, a round face with its rays drawn in fine black lines and no colour at all, because her mother said the river took colour out of everything given time. Joss had a moon on his tiller bar that his grandfather had cut with a penknife. For a long minute the two boats sat nose to nose in the basin, the way people stand in a doorway when neither will go first.

Then Ruth lifted the paddle gear and Joss, without a word, did the same. They worked the sluices together, one from each side, so the water went out of the chamber in two streams that met in the middle and sang against the stone. The Dorothy Ann dropped slowly into the trough while the Lark Moon rose to meet her, and for a moment both boats hung level in the same grey light.

At the bottom of the lock, with the gates opening ahead, Ruth looked back up at the wet stone walls. The sun and the moon were both reflected there, one above the other, shivering on the water as it drained away from them.