Black and grey geometric tattoo of a sun, circles, triangles and a crescent moon on a person's upper back, drawn with fine lines and dotwork.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Geometric sun and moon on the upper back

Geometric · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A vertical geometric composition of overlapping circles, straight lines, triangles and arrows, with a dotted sunburst at the top and a crescent moon at the bottom. The linework is fine and precise, and the shading uses stippled dots, especially on the sun and moon. The design is rendered entirely in black and grey ink against pale skin, and it sits in the centre of the frame with soft focus on the background.

Geometric Dotwork Back Sun Moon Crescent Circle Triangle Arrow Geometric line Sunburst

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Hold the lamp steady, boy, and don't ask me again why the sun's got its teeth out. Old Hennessy drew that thing on the chart-room slate the night we lost the Pellow Star off Cape Verde, and he never once let anyone rub it out. Every circle is a day's sailing. Every arrow is a wind that lied to us.

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The moon at the bottom is the one he trusted. A crescent, see, held low, the way it sits before dawn when the sea goes flat and you can take a true reading before the sun gets its eyes open. He'd say, 'Find the horizon by the dark edge, Tam,' and tap the little dot he'd pricked in with a pin, forty dots for the forty men we buried that winter. Hennessy never counted a mistake twice.

The triangle in the middle was the ship, and the straight line running through it was the course we actually held, not the one the owners wanted on their papers. He drew the lines wrong on purpose so the wrong courses would show up where a man could see them. Nobody had ever bothered to tell the underwriters that a chart could be honest.

When the squall came up off the Azores he stood where you're sitting now, dipped the pin in ink, and drew one more circle around the whole picture. 'Now we're inside it,' he said. 'Now the wind has to come to us.' We were home by the spring. The slate is still in the chart room at Bristol, and that last circle is still too big for it.