Black and grey tattoo of a full moon with two silhouetted figures on a spiral hill, bats and clouds, placed across the upper back and shoulder blade.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Full moon, spiral hill and bats on upper back

Back · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows a large full moon with two dark silhouetted figures standing side by side on a shaded hill, with a spiral swirl at the base. Bats and soft wispy clouds surround the moon on the left and right. The work uses smooth grey shading for the sky and clouds and solid black for the silhouettes and spiral, with no colour ink.

Back Moon Spiral Bat Cloud Silhouette Hill Figure

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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

Sit nearer the stove, you lot, and mind the cat. No, not that one about the mackerel king. This is the one about Marrowby Hill and the two who stood on top of it the night the moon came down low over the harbour wall.

Keep reading

The first fishermen cut a spiral path into that hill, coiling it round and round from the quay to the crown, so that anyone climbing it would arrive back at the bottom unless they climbed with a hand held. Every dusk the bats came off the chapel roof and wheeled over the nets, counting the boats in, and the clouds hung about the moon like wet washing, too thin to hide anything. Nobody in the town went up the hill after dark. The old women said the moon was too near up there and it made people forget which way was home.

But Ada Quill, who mended the lobster pots, went up anyway, the summer her brother's boat failed to come round the point. She took Tom Halloran, the tall lamplighter with the crooked fingers, because he was the only man in Marrowby who could read a spiral without getting dizzy. They climbed hand in hand, round and round, and when they reached the crown the moon was so full they could see the grain of the wood in the boats below. Her brother's sail was coming in past the rocks. They stood side by side on the shaded ground and watched it come home, and neither let go.

That is why, when the fog rolls off the water, you will still see two dark shapes up there on the hill, waiting for the boats. The bats keep them company and the clouds keep their distance. Nobody in Marrowby has ever once asked them to come down.