Two black and grey tattoos side by side: a crescent moon with a face and hanging beaded chains, and a sun with a face, rays and beaded chains on the upper back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Crescent moon and sun tattoos with chains

Back · Black and grey · Photo

The left photograph shows a crescent moon with a human face in profile, surrounded by crater dots and hung with looping beaded chains. The right photograph shows a sun with a face, a small mark on its forehead and long pointed rays, with beaded chains draped beneath it. Both designs use fine shading and stippled detail in grey and black ink on a plain skin background.

Back Other Moon Crescent moon Sun Face Chain Bead Ray Celestial

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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

Right, sit yourselves down under the damson tree where the wasps can't get at you, and mind the windfalls underfoot. Now you've all heard that the sun and the moon were sweethearts once. That's a tale told by folk who never had to share a sky. They were neighbours, and neighbours quarrel over fences and over who gets the last of the light.

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Old Mab Tenney kept the orchard at the top of Harrow Lane, and she owned a string of jet beads she wore for weddings and funerals alike. One August the moon came down to her wall, pale as skimmed milk, and asked to borrow them. The sun had robbed him of his silver again, he said, and he wanted something to hang about his edges so he'd look respectable when he went out walking. Mab said she would lend the beads if he brought them back before the first apples fell. He swore on her wall that he would.

He never did. He strung them along his crescent, looping them down past the craters where the old stars had pitted his face, and when the sun saw him wearing them he squinted out of the little mark on his brow and wanted a string of his own. So the beads went up and down the sky all autumn, from one neighbour to the other, and neither would be the first to give them back.

Mab still waits at the gate with her hand out. And that's why, on the mornings you find the grass silver and the windfalls beaded with cold, you'll know the two of them have been passing the jet across the fence again. Mind your feet on the way up the lane.