Two matching forearm tattoos in a watercolour style, a blue and purple crescent moon with a face on the left arm and an orange and red sun with a face on the right arm.

Blue moon and orange sun on forearms

Forearm · Colour · Photo

Two forearms are shown palms up, each with a tattoo of a celestial face. The left arm has a black-outlined moon with a face, shaded in blue and purple with dripping paint effects, and the right arm has a sun with rays and a face, filled with orange and red wash and red drips. The colour is loose and watercolour-like against the outlined linework, with small splatters around both designs.

Forearm Moon Sun Face Celestial Drip Splatter

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, the fire is pulling the cold out of the stones and I have not yet got to the part about the paint pots. You want to know why the moon bleeds blue into the dust and the sun runs red down the wall? Then hush and listen, for my grandmother told it to me with her hand on my knee, and I will tell it the same way.

Keep reading

The sun and the moon were sisters who shared one house at the edge of the world, and they had one jar of pigment between them, a clay pot the potter in the valley had made with a crack down its side. Each morning the sun took the colours of the dawn and painted her face gold and rose, and each night the moon took the blue of the deep water and painted hers silver-blue. They were careful. Every drop was counted. But the crack widened over the years, and when the sun reached for the red clay one evening her elbow caught the rim and the pot went over.

Red ran down the house wall in long fingers. The moon, rushing out with her brush still wet, slipped in it, and blue went everywhere, up into the sky, over the dust, into the crooks of the olive trees. Neither of them could catch it. By the time the potter came up the hill with his string and his sour face, the sisters had painted each other's faces across the sky with what was left, and the spilt colour had stayed where it fell.

So when you see the sun with her gold cheeks and her bright spiky crown, and the moon with her cloud of blue, do not scold them for being untidy. That is what the spill is for. Every drip is the day they tried to help each other and made a mess of it, and they have not stopped laughing about it since.