Matching black ink tattoos on both forearms, each showing a triangle with lettering inside and a vertical row of moon phase symbols, in a geometric style.

Triangle and moon phases on forearms

Geometric · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

The photograph shows a person's bare forearms from the elbow to the wrist, each with a matching tattoo. Each design has an inverted triangle with lettering inside it at the top, and a vertical row of moon phase shapes running down the arm, from solid dots to crescents to an open circle. The ink is black and the lines are clean and even, set against a plain wooden fence and an orange top and striped skirt.

Geometric Forearm Triangle Moon phase Moon Crescent Dot Circle Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The moon was a day past full when Mr Oakes ordered me out of the warm and into the chart room. Eleven nights of lunar distances, he said, and the Marigold would either find her longitude or find the Skerries in the dark. I had the tables open on my knee and a cup of tea going cold beside the inkwell, and every hour I wrote the angle in a column that ran down the page like a staircase.

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On the fourth night the cloud closed in and I could not see the moon at all. I sat with the book open and drew it instead, the way my father used to sketch the phases on the back of the tide tables when I was small: a solid dot for the new, then a half, then a crescent thin as a fingernail, and at the foot of the column an open ring for the full. He called the sequence a ladder. Above it, in the triangle, he had made me copy the ship's name letter by letter until I could write it with my eyes shut, though I never learned why a triangle was the right shape for a name.

At two bells the wind tore a gap in the cloud and the moon came through, low and lopsided. I took my sights and worked the sums twice by lamplight. My figure put us forty miles nearer the reef than Oakes had us on his chart. I carried the book up the companionway and held it out to him in the rain. He read the column, then read it again, and said nothing for so long that I heard the bell buoy clank somewhere to starboard.

He put the helm over. Afterwards, in the chart room, I took my pen and added one more rung to the ladder, a fresh dot in the margin beside the others, and when I looked up the moon was sliding back behind the cloud, a silver ring slipping off the edge of the glass.