Small solid black crescent moon tattoo on the inner wrist of a pale hand with black nails, set against black and white lace.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Crescent moon on the inner wrist

Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A small, solid black crescent moon sits on the inner wrist of a hand with black painted nails. The crescent is filled with dense, even black ink and has smooth edges, with no shading or fine detail. The pale skin contrasts with a black and white floral lace background.

Forearm Crescent moon Moon Lace Nail

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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

The tide tables for Skerra were kept in my aunt's hand, and every new moon she marked the dark nights with a small black crescent in the margin, the way other women cross off saints' days. Nobody on the island asked why. The boats stayed on the shingle on those nights and the children were kept indoors, and that was reason enough.

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When she died the book came to me with a bundle of lace she had been working for forty winters, a long collar of roses and leaves, still unfinished. The bobbins were wound and waiting. I sat at the window with the lamp and tried to follow her pattern, but the cloth kept going wrong at the same place, a gap no bigger than a thumbnail where the design asked for a stitch I could not find.

A man from the mainland came off the Thursday ferry wanting to know whether the Skerra crescent was a real tide sign or only a saint's mark on a calendar. I told him the truth, which was that I did not know. He looked at the collar spread across my table, said it was the prettiest thing he had seen on the island, and asked whether it was for sale.

That night, with the new moon low over the water, I took my pen and marked the margin the way she had. Then I went back to the lace and found the stitch. It was not in the pattern at all. It was a plain black hole the size of the moon, left open so the dark showed through, and once I saw it I could not stop seeing it. I left the gap as it was and went to bed with the boats quiet on the shingle.