Black and grey dotwork tattoo of two moon phases stacked on the side of a thigh, with crater detail on the lit halves.

Two moon phases on a thigh

Dotwork · Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

Two circular moon phases are stacked vertically on the outer thigh, each outlined in a fine black line. The shadowed halves are filled with dense stippled dots, while the lit halves show craters and surface texture built up with lighter dotwork. The image is a close crop with a plain grey background and a hand resting at the top edge.

Dotwork Thigh Moon Moon phase Crater Circle

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Tomasz lit the oven himself because the coal man had not come and the flour was already soft in its bowls. The moon still hung over the canal when he slid the first tray in, a fat white thing with its dark side turned away, like a loaf left too long in the proving basket.

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His grandmother used to say the moon had once been a single round loaf, the finest the village ever baked. A miller's wife went to the bakery sill each night and broke off a piece, then another, until nothing was left but a crust. The moon, shamed, went dark for a week. When it came back it had learned to share, and each night it gave away what it could, first to the fields, then to the sea, then to anyone who stayed up late enough to look.

Tomasz had never believed it. But that morning the dark edge of the moon was creeping across the sky, and the lit part had thinned to a paring. He took the knife and cut the last round of dough in two, the way his grandmother had shown him, and set one half on the sill for whatever was passing and kept the other for himself.

By the time the sky went grey the sill was bare. Crumbs lay across the wood in a loose line, pale and pitted like the ground on the moon. Tomasz brushed them into his palm and ate them standing up, and the oven ticked as it cooled.