Traditional-style tattoo on the outer forearm of a person, showing a yellow crescent moon, a small star and a woman's face beside a skull.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Crescent moon, skull and woman on forearm

Traditional · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

The tattoo on the forearm combines a woman's profile with dark flowing hair and a skull-like face with red accents. A yellow crescent moon and a small black star sit above the head. The linework is bold and black, with grey shading in the hair and skull and flat yellow and red colour.

Traditional Forearm Moon Star Skull Woman Portrait Hair

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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 nearer the stove, the lot of you, and mind the pan, it's the only warm thing left aboard. The Marguerite Ann was three days out of Grimsby when the glass fell through the floor, and Tobias Rudd, who had never once in thirty years said a kind word about the sea, came down into this galley white as skimmed milk and asked me to fetch Nell Carrow up from the hold.

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Nell was the net-mender's girl, sixteen, with hair so black and long it hung over her shoulder like a wet sail. Her grandmother had taught her to read the sky from the stern rail, and that night the crescent hung low and sharp over the water, yellow as a lamp left burning in a window. Beside it a single star was lit, and Nell frowned at it the way you'd frown at a dog that had stopped wagging. "That one's gone out in the wrong place," she said. "The weather's already come round the back of us." Nobody believed her until the swell did.

She took the wheel herself. She didn't steer for the lights of the harbour or for the old wreck off the point. She steered for the dark gap between the moon and the horizon, where the sea lay flat, and she kept the bow pointed at the painted skull her grandmother had nailed above the wheelhouse door, the one with the red in its eyes. Twelve hours we rode that lee, and by dawn the rain had gone east.

So when some clever fellow tells you the moon's only a rock lit up by the sun, you tell him about Nell Carrow. The skull still hangs in the hold, grinning at the bilge, and nobody has had the heart to paint over the red.