Small black fine line crescent moon tattoo with dotwork shading on the back of a person's neck, with grey wavy hair visible behind.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Crescent moon on the back of the neck

Fine line · Neck · Black and grey · Photo

A small crescent moon sits on the back of the neck, drawn with a thin black outline and a softer area of dotted shading along the inner curve. The ink is black and grey, and the tattoo is centred against plain pale skin with the head and hair cropped at the top of the frame.

Fine line Dotwork Neck Moon Crescent

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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

Sit closer, the fire is the only warm thing left in this house, and the wind off the fell has got into the bell rope again. Brother Anselm used to say the moon was a bowl the monks kept filling with light, and only the cellarer knew where the spout was.

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The cellarer was a man called Tobias Reeve, who had come up from the valley with one good boot and a debt he never spoke of. He took the job of trimming the lamps in the west tower because nobody else would climb there in the dark. Each night he carried oil up forty-one steps, and each night he counted them aloud, so the stone would know he was still there.

One winter the moon went thin and stayed thin for nine nights. The brothers grew quiet at vespers. Reeve noticed that the shadow it threw across the cloister wall was the shape of a paring of fingernail, and he began to scrape a small crescent into the plaster beside the door. He dotted the inner edge with the point of a nail, where the light had not yet reached, so the wall would remember what was missing.

On the tenth night the moon came back fuller than anyone had a right to expect, and the abbot called it a mercy. Reeve said nothing. He climbed the forty-one steps one last time and left the lamp unlit, because the moon did not need minding. Then he came down and ran his thumb over the scraped crescent, and the plaster was cold and dry, and he left it as it was.