Fine line black and grey geometric tattoo of stacked crescent moons and circles with dotted lines on the back of a neck.

Crescent moons and circles on the nape

Fine line · Neck · Black and grey · Photo

A vertical design of two crescent moons and small circles sits on the back of the neck, joined by a thin central line with dotted accents and small arrow-like marks. The crescents are shaded with fine dots, while the circles and connecting lines are drawn in delicate single strokes. The image is black and white and centred on the tattoo, with dark hair pulled up above it.

Fine line Geometric Dotwork Neck Crescent moon Moon Circle Dotted line Celestial Arrow

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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

The almanac for Skerrow lives in the drawer under the chart table, and you are the only one who opens it now that your grandmother's hands have gone too stiff for pencils. Each night you copy the moon's rising onto the squared page, then draw the crescent as the sky shows it, thin as a fishhook above the north pier. Her old brass dividers sit beside the inkwell, their points worn bright from forty winters of measuring.

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The island people trust the almanac more than the wireless. Fishermen ask you which tide will let the boats out past the skerries, and you answer by hanging a plumb line from the lamp hook, a dotted thread of beads that swings to show where the water will stand. You have started ruling the same line down the margin of the page, a single stroke with small marks at every fathom, because the printed tables never quite agree with the sea.

In November a crescent appeared two nights early on the page, and you checked it three times against the sky before you believed your own hand. A new moon had slipped in beside the old one, a small circle no boat would see until morning. You told nobody. You folded the almanac shut, set the dividers across the two arcs, and waited on the pier in the cold until the water came up to the marks exactly where you had drawn it.