Black and grey blackwork tattoo on an upper arm showing a woman with long hair flowing into water beneath a crescent moon, with trees, mountains and a tower.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Woman in water beneath a crescent moon

Blackwork · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A woman with long hair bends forward into water, and her hair flows out across the rippling surface. Above her sit a crescent moon, a row of pine trees, distant hills and a tall tower topped with a diamond shape. The design uses bold solid black lines and stripes with no grey shading, arranged as a framed horizontal scene across the upper arm.

Blackwork Upper arm Woman Crescent moon Tree Mountain Water Tower Long hair Landscape

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The tower on Carrick Lake had stood empty six summers when Ada Morrow climbed it with a paraffin lamp, a tin of matches and her brother's old coat. Nobody had told her the stair would hold. It did, groaning at every landing, and at the top she found the glass still in its frames and the brass diamond on the roof turned to catch the last of the light.

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The moon hung over the ridge, thin as a fingernail, and below her the water lay flat in long dark bands. Someone was in it. She saw the hair first, spreading across the surface in ropes that rocked and folded, then the bowed head and the shoulders sinking and rising again. Ada had grown up on her grandmother's lake stories. The water takes what it is owed, the old woman used to say, and gives back what it has borrowed, and anyone who goes down at the wrong hour comes up as weed.

She did not shout. She lit the lamp and held it to the glass. The figure lifted her head, and the hair ran off her like a river finding its bed. Ada pointed toward the reeds. The woman nodded once and waded out, and the lake closed behind her in widening rings.

Ada came down at dawn with the coat over her arm and found the matches gone from her pocket and a single pine needle on the sill, wet as if it had been dipped in the water. The ferryman swore the lake had been still as glass all night, and he was right. It was only Ada who kept the lamp lit in the tower after that, in case.