Black and grey fine line crescent moon tattoo with stippled shading on the upper back of a person with shoulder-length hair.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Crescent moon tattoo on upper back

Fine line · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A small black and grey tattoo of a crescent moon sits on the upper back, just below the nape of the neck. The outline is a thin, clean circle, and the crescent is filled with fine dotted shading that gives it a soft, three-dimensional edge. The background is a plain, softly lit skin surface, with the subject's hair falling over the shoulder and the tattoo centred in the frame.

Fine line Dotwork Back Moon Crescent Circle

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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

Stand closer, the lot of you, and mind the puddle by the eel man's crates, for the rain has been over Harrowgate market since Tuesday and it soaks the gossip out of everything. Now. Did I ever tell you about Nell Corrigan and the moon she lost?

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Nell sold pewter thimbles on the cobbles under the clock arch, and every night she watched the moon from her window above the chandler's. It was a full moon then, round and bright as a new penny, and it hung over the stalls like it had been paid for. But Mr Sowerby, the knife-grinder, had a wheel that squealed like a gull, and for a fortnight he had been sharpening his blades on the sky. Each night he shaved off a little more, one bright curl at a time, and carried it home wrapped in his apron.

Nell caught him on the third night. She said nothing to him. She climbed the church ladder with a tin of ink and a brush she had made from the tail of a tabby, and she traced the part that was left, a clean ring, stroke by careful stroke. The ink would not hold the light, so she dotted the dark edge with a thousand tiny points, the way you would shade the hollow of a cheek, so that the eye would remember the curve even where the moon had gone.

Sowerby still has his wheel and his apron, and the moon is still a thin crescent most weeks. But if you look up tonight, you will see the old ring drawn faint around the edge, and that is Nell's work, holding on. Mind your coats now, and mind that puddle.