Two black-and-grey outline tattoos on open palms: a small circle with a dot on the left hand and a crescent moon on the right, against a dark background and dry grass.

Circle and crescent moon tattoos on palms

Hand · Black and grey · Photo

Two open palms are shown facing the camera, each with a fine black outline tattoo. The left palm carries a circle with a small dot at its centre, and the right palm carries a crescent moon, both drawn with simple, even linework and no shading. The image is desaturated with a dark, muted tone, and the hands frame a view of dry grass through a V-shaped gap in dark clothing.

Hand Circle Dot Crescent moon Moon Palm Hand Outline

Find an artist for this

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

The ferryman on the cold river had been counting the same two coins for forty years, and he would not take them until the girl had shown him what she carried. So she opened her hands above the black water, palms out, the way her grandmother had taught her at the edge of the reed beds. On the left, a ring with a single seed of ink at its heart, which was the sun the old people said never quite set. On the right, a thin bent blade, which was the moon when it had given up half of itself to the dark.

Keep reading

He leaned over the gunwale and squinted. Then he laughed, a rusty sound like a gate. "The sun is the eye that keeps watch," he said, "and the moon is the boat that carries the watching away. Your grandmother drew them on you so you would always know which way was home." He pushed the pole against the mud and the boat slid out between the grasses, where the wind combed the seed heads flat and silver.

The girl had expected a toll, or a riddle, or a demand for the name of her dead. Instead he only turned his own palms up, and she saw that he had the same two marks, worn almost to nothing by years of rope. The dot in his circle had faded to a bruise. The crescent had lost its point.

They crossed in silence. When the far bank came up out of the dusk, she stepped onto dry ground and closed her hands, and the ink pressed back against her skin like a second pulse. Behind her, the ferryman was already pulling the boat back toward the other shore, to wait for whoever would come next with something to show him.