Black and grey stippled drawing of a crescent moon with cratered detail on a plain white background, shown as a tattoo design without a placement.

Crescent moon design

Dotwork · Black and grey · Flash

A single crescent moon is drawn in fine black dots and short strokes, with the lit edge on the right and a thin outline along its curve. Dense clusters of stipple and small crater shapes build up shading across the surface, fading toward the tips. The moon sits off-centre on a plain white background with no skin or body part visible.

Dotwork Realism Moon Crescent moon Crater Celestial

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, the lamp is only good for one face at a time. You want to know why the sea goes quiet on the north side of Inish Corra? Then mind me. My grandmother's brother Tomas was the last man to row out to the Skerry Rock before they built the lighthouse, and he had a wife called Nessa who could not abide the dark. She would stand at the top of the cliff path every night with a tin lantern and count the boats back in, and every night she counted one short.

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One November the moon was no more than a paring, a thumbnail of light, and Tomas swore to her he would be home before it grew fat. He took the small boat and the bad oar. The weather came in off the Atlantic like a shut door. Nessa climbed the path with the lantern and waited, and when the lantern guttered she lit it again with her own breath and her own last matches, and she told the sky that if it wanted a light it could have the one she had.

The moon, they say, took her at her word. It thinned and thinned until there was only the curved edge of it hung over the water, pocked and scarred like a stone the sea had worried for a thousand years. Tomas saw that edge from the Skerry, and he turned the boat by it, pulling where the light fell. He came in on the tide with the oar snapped clean in two.

So that is the reason the north shore is quiet, and the reason the old women of this island will never let a crescent moon be cursed in their hearing. Go on now. Your boat is at the slip, and the moon is the thin one tonight. Keep your eye on its horn and pull toward it.