Black ink tattoo of a crescent moon with ornamental filigree and a sun with radiating points, placed on the upper back near the shoulder blade.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Crescent moon and sun on upper back

Geometric · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A crescent moon filled with black ornamental scrollwork and small floral motifs curves around a central sun with a plain disc and long, sharp rays. The sun's rays end in diamond-shaped points, with longer tips extending upwards, downwards and to each side. The design is rendered in solid black ink on skin with no added colour, and the sun sits in the open curve of the moon against a soft, out-of-focus background.

Geometric Back Moon Crescent moon Sun Ray Scrollwork

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nell had been filing the crescent for three evenings before she admitted the scrollwork was wrong. The old pattern book showed vines curling inward, but the commission, pencilled on a card by the groom's aunt, asked for lilies climbing the outer edge, the kind her grandmother used to cut from tin for the chapel fête. Nell had only ever made moons, never a piece with a sun in it, and she did not like how much the sun seemed to want the room.

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Her master, Tobias Crane, studied the sketch over his spectacles and grunted. "The sun doesn't belong in the moon's bowl," he said. "You'd need a wall between them." He was right, and that was the trouble. The bride and groom had asked for the two to sit close without touching, so Nell spent the next night drilling a ring of tiny holes that let the rays stand free of the silver disc.

On the Saturday, the wedding party collected the brooch from the shop with rain still on their coats. The aunt held it up to the window and turned it slowly, so the light slid through the lilies and pooled inside the crescent where the sun waited. "It looks as though it's been waiting for her," the aunt said, and Nell did not correct her.

Afterwards Nell swept the bench and found one lily that had snapped, a sliver of silver no bigger than a fingernail. She dropped it into a tin of solder scraps and left the lid open a crack, so that whenever she passed the bench it caught the light.