Fine line crescent moon with swirling scrolls and small stars, shaded in grey, tattooed on a woman's upper back near the shoulder blade.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Crescent moon and stars on a shoulder

Fine line · Shoulder · Black and grey · Photo

A small crescent moon, partly shaded in soft grey, sits among delicate curling scrolls and five-point stars. The linework is thin and precise, with light shading on the moon giving it some depth. The design is in black and grey ink and is centred on the upper back, with plenty of clear skin around it.

Fine line Shoulder Moon Crescent moon Star Swirl Scroll

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The moon fell into the millpond at Harrowgate the winter the miller's youngest daughter turned sixteen, and nobody in the valley could agree who had let her go. Old Breck the ferryman said it was the frost. The priest said it was pride. Ada Vell said nothing at all, only walked down to the water every night with a lantern and a length of blue ribbon, and sat on the bank until her fingers went white.

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On the ninth night the water began to hum. A crescent came up out of the reeds, pale as a fish belly, its horns curled over with little scrolls of mist, and around it the stars came swimming up one by one like sparks off a forge. Ada tied the ribbon to the nearest horn and pulled. The moon did not come easily. It came the way a bent spoon comes out of soup, slowly and with a great deal of complaint.

She carried it up the hill in her apron, which was wet through, and set it on the lintel of the mill where the sky could see it. The stars she kept in a tin. Some nights she let them out to sit on the roof ridge and argue about the weather, and in the morning they were always back in the tin, counted, five and five and five.

The valley got its light back. Breck still says the moon was never rightly put back in the sky, only borrowed for a while, and that the scrolls on her edges are the marks of the ribbon. Ada says it is a fine thing to have a moon that needs looking after, and goes out each evening to check on her.