Black line drawing of a crescent moon filled with swirling ornamental scrollwork, with three arrows crossing vertically through it, shown as a tattoo design without a body placement.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Crescent moon with crossed arrows

Black and grey · Flash

A black outline drawing of a crescent moon, its inner curve decorated with spiral and scroll motifs. Three arrows run vertically through the centre of the moon, with their fletching at the top and arrowheads at the bottom. The image is a clean, high-contrast drawing in black ink on white with no colour and no body shown.

Crescent moon Arrow Swirl Scrollwork Ornament

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The gale had been blowing since the morning tide turned, and by dusk the Scarrow light was the only thing on the headland you could trust. You climbed the iron stairs with oil still on your sleeves and the wind leaning on the door behind you. Below, the sea broke white over the Teeth, the reef that had taken three schooners since your grandfather's day.

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Out past the reef a lamp showed, low and wrong, a fishing smack with her mast gone. Mrs Pellow from the village had said her brother and two nephews were aboard. You took the old bow down from its pegs in the lamp room, the one the first keeper, Abel Tregear, had kept for exactly this. The arrows were yew-shafted and bound at the nock with tarred twine, and each one trailed a fine hemp line you had to splice yourself before every gale. The Board had sent a mortar years ago, but Tregear's crescent was scratched above the door, and you had never trusted anything that could not be drawn by hand.

The first arrow fell short and sank in the spray. The second struck a shroud, and you heard a thin shout carried over the water. You fed the third arrow to the string, breathed out slow the way Tregear's notes instructed, and let it go. It sailed over the mast with the line hissing after it through the rain, and for a long moment nothing happened. Then the rope went taut and the men began to haul.

When the last of them crawled onto the rock, soaked and swearing, the cloud tore open and a thin moon hung over the reef, bent exactly like the one above the door. You wrote three names in the log before you let yourself sit down.