Black and grey blackwork tattoo of The Moon tarot card across a person's upper back, showing a large solid black moon with rays.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

The Moon tarot card across a back

Blackwork · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A black and grey tattoo of The Moon tarot card, framed by a black outline with the numeral XVIII at the top and the title THE MOON along the base. A large solid black moon with radiating rays sits above two towers, and below it a dog and a crayfish are shown on a winding path between hills. The bold linework and solid black fills are clear, and the card fills most of the upper back.

Blackwork Back Moon Tower Dog Path Ray

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

By three the moon over the ridge had gone the colour of a bruise on its second day, and Maureen from Ward 9 swore it always did that when the two towers of the old block caught the light. I pushed the linen trolley past the lifts and didn't argue. Nobody argues with Maureen at three in the morning.

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Mr Pargeter's whippet had been brought in at midnight, wrapped in a fleece, because his grandson couldn't sleep without it. The vet nurse had gone home at ten, so the dog lay on the lino outside the day room and thumped its tail whenever I passed. I sat down beside it and told it about the crayfish. The crayfish belonged to a boy called Tomasz, who had caught it in the beck behind the bins and kept it in a bucket on his windowsill. It had walked, he said, all the way up the hill to the ward, sideways, one claw placed carefully in front of the other, along the grass verge and the cracked path, because that is what crayfish do when they want to be somewhere else.

At four the boy's monitor flatlined on the big screen, then climbed back up, and everyone laughed too loudly. I went out to the bench by the ambulance bay. The moon hung between the towers as if someone had pinned it there, and below it the car park dipped and rose like hills I had never walked.

When I came back the whippet had climbed onto the empty chair and was staring out at the moon as though it expected the thing to come down and fetch it. I left them to it. In the morning there was a line of wet marks across the tarmac from the bins to the ward door, and nobody swept them up.