Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Woman and crescent moon with rose

Traditional · Mixed · Flash

A flash design showing a woman in profile facing a crescent moon that has a man's face in its curve. A grey shaded rose with dark leaves sits behind her hair on the left. Bold black outlines and black and grey shading are used throughout, with orange-red tones on the woman's face and neck, set against a white border on a dark background.

Traditional Woman Profile Crescent moon Rose Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You are the lamp-keeper at Saint Oswin's on the fen edge, which means you climb the tower stair before matins with the oil can under your arm and trim the wick before the brothers come up the nave steps. Tonight the wind has dropped and the reeds are still. The moon hangs low over the water, a thin pale paring, and it has a man's face cut into its curve. Glaziers in the town say the abbey's old window was made by a drunk who gave him that brow. You have never liked him. He looks at the tower the way a magistrate looks at a late tithe.

Keep reading

Brother Anselm, who keeps the bells, says the chronicle tells it differently. In the year the Ely novice came to read by the tower lamp, the moon grew so fond of her that he came down to the water every night to see her face. She is the woman on the board in the refectory, turned in profile with her hair up and a grey rose pinned above her ear, the one the novice pressed from the garden that summer and never gave back. Anselm reads this aloud as though it were a sermon, and you have told him the wick is hardly the place for sermons.

Tonight you trim the wick and the flame leans toward the window, toward the water and the paring above it, and for a moment the light makes the man's mouth look almost sorry. You let the flame settle. Then, at the foot of the stair, on the third step from the bottom, you find a single rose petal, grey in the lamplight and dry as a page. You pocket it to show Anselm at breakfast. He will say it blew in through the louvres. You will say nothing, and you will both know the window was open only a crack.