Black ink drawing of a crescent moon tattoo design filled with curling swirls and hatched shapes, shown as a stencil-style sketch on white paper.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Crescent moon with ornamental swirls

Black and grey · Flash

A black ink line drawing of a crescent moon, with its inner curve decorated by spirals, scrolls and tapered flourishes. Some areas contain hatched and solid black fills, while the open part of the moon is left blank on a plain white background. The composition is symmetrical along the crescent and shows no body part.

Crescent moon Moon Swirl Spiral Scroll

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lime had gone off in the bucket before Tomas finished the third spiral, so I carried the rest of the stone up the tower stair on my back and cursed him the whole way. Carrick Scar had been roofless since the Dutch wars, and the Hartley family wanted its gatehouse made presentable for the summer fair. Tomas wanted a moon. He said the old lords had put crescents over every arch on this coast to keep the sea from coming in, and that nobody remembered why.

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We worked through the wet weeks with a chisel and a soft brush. Tomas cut the scrolls deep so the rain would sit in them, and he hatched the fat horn of the moon with lines as close as eyelashes, which I thought was showing off. On the last evening he sat back on his heels and said the open side should stay bare. 'Leave the sea its room,' he said, wiped his hands on his trousers, and that was the end of his opinion on the matter.

Afterwards I kept the lamp lit in the gatehouse, because the Hartleys paid double for night watch and I had nowhere warmer to be. Most nights the moon sat in the stone above the arch with its spirals full of water and its heart empty. Then a spring tide came in grey and high over the rocks below, and I stood on the parapet to watch it climb the shingle. It reached the stone's open curve and slid up into the blank space, and for one minute the whole crescent was silver, a thin bright bowl of water held up to the sky. I lowered the lamp and let it be.