Black and grey traditional style tattoo of a smiling crescent moon with a seated black cat on its lower horn, on the upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Crescent moon and cat on upper arm

Traditional · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A crescent moon with a smiling face in profile curves down the left side of the frame, with a black cat sitting on its lower horn and looking up towards the top of the moon. The moon and cat are outlined with bold black linework, and the moon's surface and the cat's body are filled with grey shading built from stippled dots. The tattoo is shown in black and grey against pale skin on a dark background.

Traditional Dotwork Upper arm Moon Crescent moon Cat Face

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The miller's daughter at Hollin Edge had never once seen the moon smile until the autumn the black cat began to climb it. Her father said the cat had come out of the beech wood behind the village, where the old charcoal burner had lived before the fever took him, and that no cat with any sense would go near that wood after dark. Bet said nothing. She had heard the cat at night, a low rough talking that drifted over the roofs from the ridge.

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The cat sat on the lower horn of the moon the way a child sits on a gate, its tail curled down past its feet. It looked up at the moon's face, and the moon looked back sideways and sly, as though it were the one who had been waiting for company. Each night the cat told it something. Bet could not make out the words, only the rhythm, the way a person tells a long story they already know by heart.

In the third week of the frost the talking stopped. The next night the moon was full and round and had no face at all, only a pale disc that lit the frozen fields so you could read by it. Bet's father went up to the wood with a lantern and came back saying the burner's hut was empty and the gatepost bare.

Bet went to the window that night and found the cat on her sill, dry and warm, purring against the glass. She let it in. In the morning, when she looked up, the thin crescent was back over the ridge, and she could have sworn the lower horn was a little worn, as though something heavy had sat on it all winter.