Black and grey lettering tattoo reading I love you to the moon and back, with a small crescent moon beneath it, on the inner forearm near the wrist.

To the moon and back quote on a wrist

Lettering · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo is a handwritten-style quote reading I love you to the moon and back, set in black ink across the skin in a slightly curved arrangement. A solid black crescent moon sits below the final lines of text. The photograph is greyscale, so the linework and shading appear in contrast tones against a light skin background.

Lettering Forearm Quote Moon Crescent moon Love Handwriting

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, the lot of you, and mind the fire doesn't take your eyebrows. Ada Pennock lived in the last cottage before Hollin Wood, where the lane gives up and becomes a sheep track. Her husband Tom carried salt up from the coast on a mule that hated him, and every evening when he left she stood at the gate and said the same thing: I love you to the moon and back.

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Tom always laughed. The moon, he said, is two hundred and forty thousand miles off, and I am a man with a bad hip. But one winter the mule went down in a drift near Cold Ferry, and Tom did not come home for nine days. Each night Ada walked to the edge of the trees with a lantern and called his name, and each night the moon hung over the wood, thin as a paring of cheese, patient and unhelpful.

On the ninth night she took her knife and a strip of tin from the bread box, and she cut a small crescent and hung it on a nail by the gate. Then she went out into the snow, because she had decided that if love was measured in distance, she would at least make the going count, and she walked to the fork where the path divides, and she called until her voice gave out.

Tom came up the lane the next morning, frostbitten and cursing, guided by the lamp she had left burning on the post. The tin moon was still on its nail, a fresh string threaded through its tip. He wore it on his collar for the rest of his life, and when the valley folk ask why the saying got so far, I tell them it was never about the moon at all. It was about a woman who went looking for the far end of the road.