Black and grey crescent moon with shaded stars and tribal swirls tattooed on dark skin, sitting on the side of the torso.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Crescent moon and stars with tribal swirls

Neo-trad · Other · Black and grey · Photo

A shaded crescent moon sits at the centre of the design, with small stars with highlighted points arranged around it. Black tribal-style swirls and curling tendrils extend upward and downward from the moon, framing it. The design is done in black ink and grey shading, with smooth gradients on the moon and the stars and bold, solid black linework on the swirls.

Neo-trad Other Moon Crescent Star Swirl Tribal

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit down, the lot of you, and mind the hat stand. No, the moon doesn't come to every dance, only to the ones where somebody's brave enough to ask it. That was the winter the Starlight Rooms had its ceiling taken down for the damp, and Mrs Pardoe, who ran the cloakroom, hung her lamps from the rafters on wire.

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The moon was a thin one that year, a clipped fingernail of light, and she'd been sulking over the harbour since Michaelmas. Nobody expected her to bother with a dance hall. But Jack Tolley, who played the upright piano with two fingers and a grudge, put his hand flat on the keys and played the tune his mother hummed at the washing line, slow and stubborn, the one with the rising stair in it. Stars came out one by one through the gap where the slates had gone. Each one landed on a pair of shoulders and stayed there, the way a good partner does.

Halfway through the waltz the moon came down the wire, curled herself like a shaving of tin, and asked Jack for the next dance. He said he had only two fingers. She said that was plenty for a crescent. They turned under the lamps with the old wallpaper's swirls curling round them like ivy that had learned manners, and the whole room went quiet to watch.

When the lamps were lit again the moon had gone back up through the gap, thinner than before. Mrs Pardoe swears there's a dent in the piano keys still, and a single silver star stuck to the underside of a floorboard that she never could shift. So if you're dancing tonight and the room goes still, don't look up at the roof. Look at your feet.