Colour tattoo of a crescent moon filled with blue, teal and pink galaxy shading and small white dots, on the inner forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Galaxy crescent moon on a forearm

Forearm · Colour · Photo

A crescent moon with a bold black outline sits alone on pale skin with a few freckles, against a dark background. The inside of the moon is filled with blue, teal, purple and pink shading that suggests a nebula, with scattered light dots for stars. The moon is centred in the frame, with plenty of clear space around it.

Forearm Moon Crescent Galaxy Nebula Star

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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

Hold the lamp steady, boy, and mind the vat, the woad is still sulking from this morning's heat. You want to hear why the dyer's moon hangs over the harbour wall? Then sit, because I will not tell it twice.

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Thessaly had a dyer named Anis who could not lay a cloth in blue without it wanting to be the night. Every bolt came up speckled, as though someone had flicked a brush of silver across it. The merchants called it a fault. Anis said the sky had simply not been finished.

One autumn a sailor brought her a sliver of crescent-shaped tin, bright as a fish scale, and asked her to make it into a sign for his ship. She dipped it in the woad, then in the madder the women boiled down from the red roots by the marsh. Where the two colours met, the cloth went purple, then a rosy pink, then a teal the colour of shallow water. She stitched a black edge round it so the light would not run off.

The sailor laughed when he saw it. He hung it at the prow and sailed west, and the next spring the whole harbour swore the crescent had carried him home through a fog that swallowed every other lamp. Anis never sold another plain bolt. Mind the vat now. The sky wants its dye back.