Coloured drawing of a crescent moon formed from sunflowers in yellow, orange and brown on a white card, a botanical tattoo design.

Crescent moon made of sunflowers

Botanical · Colour · Flash

A crescent moon is built from several sunflower heads with dark brown centres and layered yellow and orange petals. The petals are drawn with fine outlines and shading, and the moon's inner curve is left as bare white card. The design sits centred on a plain white card placed on a cream textured surface.

Botanical Sunflower Crescent moon Moon Flower Design

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Right, you lot at the back, stop poking your brother and listen, because this is true as the tide tables. Up on Gull Head there was a woman called Maud Penhallow who grew sunflowers in rows so straight the gulls took them for soldiers. Every August she cut the heads and carried them down to the harbour in a barrow, and the fishermen bought them to brighten their wheelhouses, because a boat with a yellow flower in the window comes home, so they say.

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The winter the herring went deep, the harbour lamps failed one by one, and the old lighthouse keeper swore the moon had been taken. Nobody believed him until Maud walked down the quay at dusk with her arms full of dead stalks and a sack over her shoulder. She tipped the sack out on the wet stones, and there was the moon, cold and silver and folded up like a letter nobody had opened.

She didn't say a word. She just began to pin the sunflower heads around its curve, one by one, with bent nails, and every head she set down turned its face to the sky and started to glow the colour of marigold tea. By midnight the moon was whole again, though its inner curve stayed bare, like a bowl waiting for soup.

Mind this now: if you ever see a sunflower turn its back on the sun at dusk, it is only looking for the moon it lent out. And that, my dears, is why the old boats still smell of hay in the spring.