Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Crescent moon and woman with flowing hair

Black and grey · Flash

A pen and ink drawing shows a crescent moon outlined in a single heavy line, with a moon face in profile on its inner edge. A woman's profile sits within the crescent, her hair flowing outward in many fine, wavy hatched strands that extend past the moon's outline. The work is entirely in black ink on cream paper, with shading built up through dense hatching on the hair and the figure's shoulder.

Moon Crescent moon Woman Profile Hair Face Celestial

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

The milk train was forty minutes late, and the moon had come down low over Ashbourne Junction to keep me company while I waited. I stood on the platform with my lamp turned down and the timetable folded in my coat, listening to the wind come off the cutting and rattle the enamel signs. Nobody else was about. Harold had gone to bed in the booking hut with his feet on the stove, and the only other light for miles was the gas lamp above the gents.

Keep reading

The moon was a plain crescent that night, drawn in one heavy line so sharp you could have cut a ticket on it. Someone had given it a face on the inner curve, a man's profile or perhaps a woman's, with the eyes closed and the nose lifted as if it smelled rain. Out of its shadow came the hair, long and wavy and hatched so finely it looked like coal dust combed through with a fork. It streamed past the edge of the moon and over the signal gantry and out across the sidings, the way steam trails from a tank engine when the driver opens her up on the bank.

My mother used to say the moon only looked at the railway because the railway made so much noise, and that a moon with its eyes shut was a moon that trusted the men on the footplates. I did not believe her then. I believed the timetable. But when the signal dropped with a clang at a quarter past two, I thought of her and touched my cap to the sky, which is the sort of foolishness you pick up on nights alone.

The milk train came round the bend at twenty past, its headlamp swinging across the platform, and I caught the moon full in the beam. The hair lifted and fell back with the smoke. I stamped the time into the register, 02.20, and under it wrote that the moon had kept its eyes shut the whole way in.