Traditional style tattoo on a forearm showing a black and grey crescent moon with stars, beside a red rose with black leaves.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Crescent moon and red rose on a forearm

Traditional · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A crescent moon shaded in black and grey with fine hatched detail sits on the left, with small star shapes and a dagger-like form crossing its lower edge. A red and black rose with dark leaves sits on the right, and a partial dark design with a bird-like shape appears along the bottom edge. The bold outlines, saturated red petals and plain background focus attention on the central motif.

Traditional Forearm Crescent moon Rose Star Leaves Dagger Bird

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The rain had been coming off the Humber since four, and by six the market on Dock Street was a river of cardboard and torn price tags. I was still hauling the tarpaulin off my trestle when the old man with the brass telescope asked whether I had any roses left. I didn't, not red ones. Nobody buys roses in February unless they're sorry about something.

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He wanted one red and one black, he said, the black for his brother, who had gone to sea before the war and never sent a card. I had a bucket of dark-leaved stems the florist down the road had given me for nothing, so I wrapped two in brown paper while the gulls argued over a split bag of crisps. He paid in coppers and a button shaped like a crescent moon, which he pressed into my palm as if it were change.

I found the chalk swallow on the back board that evening, a dagger drawn beside it, when I went to close up. Somebody had sketched little stars across the tarp in wet pencil. I don't know who. I stood in the drizzle and turned the button over. On the back, scratched small, was a bird in flight with a folded letter in its beak.

Ten days later a parcel came to the stall with no postmark. Inside was a single black feather and a note in careful capitals: HE SAILED AT LAST. I keep the button on the windowsill now, where the streetlight catches its edge like a thin white blade, and every February I put a red rose in a jar and wait for the rain to stop.