Black ornamental crescent moon tattoo with swirling linework and a small blue star, on the lower back above the waistband of jeans.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Crescent moon and star on the lower back

Back · Mixed · Photo

A black crescent moon filled with ornate swirling linework sits on the lower back, with a small solid blue star to its right. The black lines are fine and curling, with the swirls following the curve of the moon. Blue ink is used only for the star, so the rest of the design is black, against smooth skin and a grey knit top above dark denim.

Back Crescent moon Star Swirl Moon

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

In the kingdom of Corrowby the moon was hung on an iron hook above the mill, and every dusk the miller's daughter, Ysolde Frane, climbed the ladder to make sure it was still caught. Nobody remembered who had forged the hook. The smiths of the valley said it was too finely wrought for ordinary hands, its curls and scrolls running round the crescent like ivy round a gatepost, and that it held only because each scroll held the next.

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One November the wind came off the moor and rattled every shutter in Corrowby. When the bell rang for the Hallow Fair, the Pell boy had not come home. His mother stood at the mill gate with a lantern that the wind kept putting out. Ysolde did not wait for her father's permission. She reached up, worked the hook loose with both hands, and the moon came down into her arms, lighter than she had expected and cold as a coin.

She carried it onto the moor road and held it high. The light ran along the wet heather and showed the boy sitting against a stone wall with a string of blue glass beads broken in his fist. Before she went back to the mill she took one bead and hooked it onto the moon's upper horn, where it swung and caught the light. At dawn she hung the moon again, though the hook had bent and the crescent sagged a little to the west. Corrowby still says the star on the moon is the boy's bead, and that the moon has never once been dropped since.