Black and grey linework tattoo of two clawed hands over a stippled dark shape, with a crescent moon above, on a lower leg.

Clawed hands and crescent moon on a lower leg

Dotwork · Calf · Mixed · Photo

The main piece shows two pale hands with long pointed nails, drawn in clean black outline, with a small cross marked on one hand. Behind them, a dark dotwork shadow forms a spiky, horned shape, and a crescent moon sits to the upper left. Coloured tattoo work in red and yellow appears at the top and bottom edges of the frame, while the central design is in black and grey.

Dotwork Calf Hand Claw Crescent moon Cross Horn

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 mortar was still wet when the old steward told you to leave the north window alone, so naturally you climbed up to look at it at dusk, lamp in one hand and trowel in the other. Someone had carved a crescent moon above the arch, its horns worn soft by three hundred winters, and beneath it a pair of stone hands pressed flat to the sill, fingers spread, nails long and curled like sickle tips. Mrs Ashdown called them the Keepers. Nobody in Harrowgate Keep had ever asked what they were keeping.

Keep reading

You were the one who had to mend the cracked lintel, so you knew the stone better than anyone. The hands were not carved the way a mason carves. The cuts were too fine, each crosshatched line stippled in with a point until the shadow behind them looked like soot ground into the rock. When the lamp swung, that shadow rose into a crown of spikes, two long horns clawing up the wall toward the broken roof, and the moon above them looked suddenly thin and sharp.

On the third night the mortar was dry. You scraped a cross into the sill with your thumbnail, the way your grandmother marked a door against the cold, and the stone hands went still. Then the left one lifted, slow as frost creeping over glass, and rested its nail against your wrist. It did not cut. It only waited, the way a clerk waits for a signature.

You pressed your name into the dust on the sill, and the hands took it. In the morning the steward found the window sealed, the lamp burned out, and your trowel lying clean on the flagstones. He shrugged, bricked the arch, and told the village the new mason had gone south. Some nights, when the wind comes off the sea and the moon is a white horn, something knocks once from inside the wall, polite as a visitor, and asks after you.