Back view of a woman with raised arms showing a small fine line crescent moon tattoo at the nape with a dotted line running down the upper back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Crescent moon and dotted line on upper back

Fine line · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A woman is photographed from behind with her arms raised and her hair tied up, wearing a black strappy crop top and a black skirt outdoors. The tattoo is a small crescent moon at the top of the spine, below the nape, with a thin dotted line descending vertically from it. The black ink is delicate and minimal, set against smooth skin and a softly blurred green background.

Fine line Back Moon Crescent moon Dotted line

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 plumb line swung and settled over the wet paving outside the old Salford goods yard, and I marked the spot with a chalk dot before Dennis could complain about the cold. It was gone two in the morning. The council wanted a footpath through the yard by spring, and somebody had to walk the line first, one dot every two metres, the way my father had taught me on the moorland fences.

Keep reading

Dennis carried the tripod and talked about his allotment while I kept looking up. A crescent moon hung over the chimney stacks, thin as a fingernail paring, and it made the rooftops look cut from card. Every few steps I counted under my breath and dotted the pavement with chalk, and the dots ran straight back toward the canal like a sentence that had not finished.

At the canal wall the line ran out. Dennis said that was the point of surveying: you went until the world told you to stop. I stood on the coping stone with the chalk box in my pocket and thought about Mum, who once drew a moon on the back of a shopping list and told me it was the sky keeping half a secret on purpose.

I made one last dot, a little past where the stakes stopped, and wrote the date beside it in small careful figures. By morning the men would pour tarmac over it, and nobody walking that path would know the line began in the dark with two tired people and a moon too thin to hold anything up. I liked that more than I expected.