Fine line crescent moon on the side of one finger and a small solid star on another finger, shown on a hand against a pale wall.

Crescent moon and star on fingers

Fine line · Hand · Black and grey · Photo

A hand held up against a pale background shows two tiny tattoos on the fingers. A thin outlined crescent moon sits on the side of the upper finger, and a small solid black star sits on the finger below it. The linework is fine and the ink is black, with no shading or colour, and the hand fills most of the frame.

Fine line Hand Moon Crescent Star Finger

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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 ward goes quiet around three, the way a chapel does after the last hymn, and you learn to hear the drip pumps in bay four before anything else. Sister Okafor has left a tin of chocolate Hobnobs on the drugs trolley with a note saying eat one, you look like a ghost. You don't eat one. You check the obs for bed nine, where Mr Pardoe has been asking since teatime for the window to be opened an inch.

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You open it. The air that comes in smells of wet tarmac and the diesel from the ambulance bay, and above the multi-storey car park there is a thin silver crescent hanging low, with one bright star beside it, as if someone had pinned a note to the dark. Mr Pardoe lifts his head off the pillow to look. His wife, he says, used to call the moon the sickle and the star her torch, because she was always losing things in the garden after dark. He says it without any particular sadness, the way you might mention the weather in a town you no longer live in.

When the sky greys over the car park at six, the moon has gone and the star has gone with it. At handover you write the observations in the book in your neat night-shift capitals: temperature normal, pain controlled, window open one inch at patient's request. Then, in the margin, where nobody will read it but the day staff and possibly the auditors, you add a line that isn't a clinical observation at all. Moon set 05:48, star still up at three. Sister Okafor reads it over your shoulder and takes a biscuit for herself, and this time you let her.