Traditional black and grey tattoos of a crescent moon and a sun with faces, placed side by side on a forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Crescent moon and sun on forearms

Traditional · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

Two tattoos sit side by side on a person's forearms: a crescent moon with a face on the left and a rayed sun with a face on the right. Bold black outlines define both designs, with grey shading on the faces and the moon's cloud-like curls. The image is a close, evenly lit view with a plain background.

Traditional Forearm Moon Crescent moon Sun Face Celestial

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Brother Anselm hands you the brush on the feast of Saint Swithun, which is how you know the abbot has run out of patience with the sundial. The sun is painted on the south wall of the abbey yard, rayed and hot-tempered, with a pair of heavy-lidded eyes and a mouth that has sulked since the damp got into the plaster. Across the cloister, on the east range, the moon keeps her crescent turned away from him, her curls of cloud shaded in soft grey. Nobody living remembers why the two were painted to look anywhere but at each other. The old ledgers say only that the painters quarrelled over the price of lapis.

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You mix a grey wash in a cracked saucer and climb the scaffold with the stiff bristles. Anselm stands below and tells you that the moon sleeps in the daytime, so her lashes must stay down until dusk. You work on the sun first, softening the shadow under his brow and lifting the corners of his mouth by the width of a barleycorn. Your hands ache. The wall smells of lime and cold stone, and somewhere a novice is singing the wrong note in the chapel.

At compline the light goes orange and then thin. You step down, wipe the brush on your habit, and look up. The sun's mouth has become something like patience. Across the yard, the moon's eyelids are lifted, and for the length of the bell's last toll her shadow falls across the flagstones straight to his wall. You stand between the two shadows until the bell stops, and then you go in to supper.