Black and grey fine line tattoo of a crescent moon with stars and trailing dots on the upper back near the shoulder blade.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Crescent moon and stars on a shoulder blade

Fine line · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A crescent moon with a shaded edge sits at the top of the design, with small five-pointed stars clustered inside its curve. A trail of tiny dots and sparkle-like stars falls diagonally downward from the moon across the skin. The tattoo is rendered in black and grey with soft shading on the moon and crisp outlines on the stars, set against plain, evenly lit skin on the upper back.

Fine line Back Moon Crescent moon Star Dot Celestial

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The snow had buried the lane to the top of the gate by the time Nell Harrow gave up on the road and let the stranger in. He stood dripping on the flags of the taproom, a tin trunk at his feet and a brass telescope case under one arm, and he apologised for everything: the weather, the hour, the mud on her clean rug. She told him the rug had seen worse and hung his coat by the range.

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Through the night the wind worried at the shutters. The stranger, whose name was Aldo Pike and who said he mapped the sky for a living, set the telescope on the sill of the back window and counted stars aloud, touching each one with the tip of a pencil on a scrap of paper. "Seven falling," he said. "My grandmother called that the Hunter's dog." He wanted the moon, which had thinned to a paring over the Cheviot, but cloud sat on it like a lid on a pan.

Near four the cloud tore. Nell stood beside him in her nightdress with a shawl around her shoulders and saw the crescent come clear, pale as a fingernail, with a loose scatter of little stars dropping from it toward the drifts. Pike went very still. "My sister had that inked on her back, the moon and the scatter," he said. "She swore if you followed the dots you'd find the place you were meant to be." He did not say where his sister was now, and Nell did not ask.

At first light a boy with a shovel cleared the lane, and the trunk went out on a sledge. Pike left a sketch on the bar: the crescent, seven stars, and a trail of dots running off the edge of the page. Under it he had written Ta, for the room. Nell pinned it above the till, beside the price of the ale, and every morning after that she checked which way the dots were pointing.