Traditional style crescent moon tattoo with a purple rose and gold roses and leaves on a teal fill, placed on the lower leg.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Crescent moon with roses on the lower leg

Traditional · Calf · Colour · Photo

A bold crescent moon forms the main shape, with a purple rose and two orange-gold roses with leaves filling its inner curve. The design uses a thick black outline and flat, solid colour fills with minimal shading, and the teal background sits behind the flowers. The moon is centred on a close crop of smooth skin with a blurred blue surface at the edge.

Traditional Calf Moon Crescent moon Rose Flower Leaves

Find an artist for this

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

Dad painted the lettering on the Waltzer and I painted everything else, which in our family meant the gaps. That August the fair pitched on the rec at Thorncombe, and the big crescent on the front of the Moonlight Rides had cracked clean through its black outline in the rain. Dad said we'd repaint it by Friday. He did not say how, and I knew he'd been losing sleep over the purple.

Keep reading

Mum's old pattern book had the roses in it, the fat ones with the tight curl at the heart, done in gouache by a man in Blackpool who signed his sheets with a fish. I copied the orange-gold ones first, three of them tumbling down the inner curve as if someone had spilled marmalade on the sky. Then the purple. Dad mixed it from two tubs and a prayer, and it came out exactly right, which made him go quiet and walk outside for a fag.

Friday came with the wind, and the wagon doors banged all night over the dodgems. At dawn I climbed the ladder with the last of the teal, the colour of a lagoon nobody had seen, and found the moon already dry under a skin of dew. The crack was gone. Dad stood below with his hands in his pockets, squinting up at it.

'Well,' he said. 'Now it's just a moon with flowers on.' Then he went to wake the ponies, and I stayed up the ladder a while longer, watching the real one fade over the car park, thinking that a thing only has to be painted carefully enough to hold its shape.