Fine line black geometric tattoo of a vertical arrow with a crescent moon and overlapping circles on a person's upper back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Arrow, crescent moon and circles on upper back

Fine line · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A vertical arrow runs down the centre of the upper back, with a crescent moon and several overlapping thin circles around its middle. The linework is fine and black, with small dots and short ticks along the arrow shaft and circles. The skin is pale and the photo is taken from behind, with a teal satin camisole and black lace trim below the tattoo.

Fine line Geometric Back Arrow Crescent moon Circle Moon Dot

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Your grandmother's bow hangs above the hearth at Ashcombe, and every autumn you take it down to check the string against the frost. This year the string sings wrong. You carry the bow out past the last cottage, where the ground goes soft and the oaks stop pretending to be a hedge, and you stand at the place the villagers call the Hollow Ring, a clearing of pale stones set in an almost perfect circle.

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Nobody cuts there. Your mother told you the stones were placed by people who measured the moon with knotted cord, and that a thin moon will take a fletched arrow if you loose it at the right hour. You do not believe her. You believe in the weight of the arrow in your palm, its feathers grey as ash, the shaft pricked with small black dots where you marked every dark night since midsummer.

At dusk the sickle moon lifts over the beeches. You nock the arrow, draw until your shoulder burns, and loose it through the centre of the stones. It does not fall. It hangs in the air, a black line running between the crescent and the ring, shivering like a plucked note, and the dots along its shaft begin to loosen, one by one, drifting out across the clearing and up into the trees.

By morning the arrow is gone and the stones are wet with something that is not dew. Later the children of Ashcombe find a small circle scratched into the bark of the nearest beech, a dot at its heart and a crescent carved beside it, as if the wood has been keeping a tally of its own. You keep the bow. You stopped counting nights the day you let go.