Black and grey crescent moon tattoo with shaded stars and swirling vines on the side of a torso, over the ribs.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Crescent moon and stars on the ribs

Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A black and grey tattoo of a shaded crescent moon sits among swirling vines, leaf-like tendrils and five-pointed stars. The moon and stars use grey shading for depth, while the vines are solid black linework. The design runs diagonally across the side of the torso against smooth, dark skin.

Ribs Crescent moon Star Swirl Vine Leaves

Find an artist for this

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

In the years after the long dark, the people of Varrow Deep kept their vines in the lower ring, where the grow-lights hummed and the water ran through pipes as thin as wrists. Old Tamsin Hale was trusted with the cuttings, because she could tell by touch which shoots would climb and which would sulk. Every night the ring dimmed to its sleep-cycle, and the only light left was the pale crescent painted on the hatch of the observation dome, which the founders had put there to remind them where the real moon hung.

Keep reading

One winter the sap stopped rising. Tamsin walked the rows with her palm flat against each stem and found the vines brittle as old paper. The engineers said the lights were fine. The council said the rations would hold. Tamsin went to the dome instead, climbed the ladder to the hatch, where the star studs gleamed in their silver rings, and spoke to the crescent the way her grandmother had taught her, asking it plainly what it wanted.

The answer, if it was one, came in the morning from the boy who swept the dome. He had found a crack in the outer pane, and through it a fine silver thread running from the moon's curve down toward the pipes. Someone long ago had laid a conduit beneath the paint, a little path of light. Tamsin followed it with a torch and found a sealed valve, and beyond the valve the old reserve tank, full of water nobody had remembered.

They opened the valve and the vines drank. By the next dark cycle the leaves had uncurled along the trellis like hands opening, and the stars on the hatch caught the lamplight one by one. Tamsin never claimed to know who had hidden the water, only that the founders had been careful people who drew their map where children would see it every day. She kept the ladder greased and the moon scrubbed, and that was enough for her.