Black and grey crescent moon tattoo with a stylised face, filigree swirls, stars and dotted chains on the ribs.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Crescent moon with face on ribs

Dotwork · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A crescent moon with a stylised face in profile sits on the side of the torso, decorated with scrollwork along its edge. Inside the curve are a large eight-pointed star, smaller stars and a soft shaded glow, with strings of fine dots hanging from the moon's tips and lower edge. The tattoo is rendered in black and grey with smooth shading and crisp linework on pale skin.

Dotwork Ribs Moon Crescent moon Face Star Swirl Filigree Dotted chain

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The telephone exchange on Mill Lane closed at ten, but the night the Pritchards' lines went dead in the snow, Mrs Dunn sent me up the ladder to see what the wind had done. I was nineteen and had never been higher than the church roof. From the top of the pole I could see all of Harwick laid out like a dropped handkerchief, and above it the moon, half gone, with a face on it that looked the other way.

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My nan had told me about the moon when I was small. She said the man in it had been left behind by the sun and was too proud to ask for a lift. He kept his stars in a tin under the bed and only let them out on clear nights, so they could be counted. I thought that was nonsense until I saw the bright one, the eight-pointed star hanging low over the allotments, and understood it was the only thing in the sky that had stayed exactly where it was put.

I mended the line by torchlight with numb fingers, and when I came down Mrs Dunn was waiting at the foot of the ladder with a cup of tea gone lukewarm. She asked what I had seen. I told her about the moon and the tin of stars. She didn't laugh. She said her husband had proposed under that same star in 1919 and had never once agreed that it was a star at all.

I took the night shift every week after that. On clear nights I sat by the window with the board humming and counted the stars the way my nan had taught me, and whenever the lines were quiet I watched the crescent slide down behind the chapel roof, face turned away, as if it had somewhere better to be.