Black and grey crescent moon tattoo filled with clustered roses and small star dots, shown on skin in a blackwork and botanical style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Crescent moon and roses

Botanical · Other · Black and grey · Photo

A large crescent moon outlines the design, with a cluster of detailed roses filling the lower curve of the moon. The solid black crescent is dotted with small white star-like speckles, while the roses use fine stippled linework and shading. The design is entirely in black ink and grey tones, set against pale skin with a dark background at the top edge.

Botanical Blackwork Dotwork Other Crescent moon Moon Rose Star

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The cook on the Halcyon Wren kept one rule that nobody aboard could explain. Before she lit the galley stove each evening, she cut a heel from the morning loaf and set it on the rail, whatever the weather. Her mother had done the same in the fishing sheds at Whitby, and her mother before that, and the custom had outlived whatever reasons first lay behind it.

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Tobias, the ship's boy, asked about it the autumn the moon went thin. The cook was scraping carrots and did not look up. She said the moon was a garden, and the sea was its bed, and every man who went under the water was given a rose to hold. The dark part of the moon was where the stars kept watch over them. Tobias said that was a daft thing to believe. She said it was a daft thing to be wrong about, and handed him the knife.

That night the moon had grown fat and pale over the bay, and the roses along its lower edge had multiplied, so many that they tumbled off the curve towards the water. Tobias counted eleven before the bread went cold on the rail. He counted a twelfth, pink and unfinished, right at the lip where the swell broke. The cook came up the companionway with a lamp, saw him staring, and said nothing at all. She set a second heel beside the first and pressed a warm crust into his palm, telling him to eat it before it went the way of the rest.