Black lettering reading "I love you to the moon and back" with a small crescent moon below it, tattooed on the inner forearm near the wrist.

"I love you to the moon and back" on a wrist

Lettering · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo is a handwritten-style quote, "I love you to the moon and back", set across three lines, with a solid black crescent moon beneath the final line. The letters are monoline with even weight, and the crescent is filled in solid black. The ink is black only, and the image is a close, slightly angled photograph of the skin with the text fully legible.

Lettering Forearm Quote Moon Crescent moon Text

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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 rope-walks of Ambry measured everything in lovers, which is to say nobody agreed on anything. My father sold hemp by the fathom, but for sentimental customers he quoted the distance a man might walk to see his sweetheart and be home before the bread went stale. Old Mirren at the north gate swore the only honest measure was to the moon and back, and she kept a knotted cord on a nail by her door to prove it.

Keep reading

When I was twelve the Queen's surveyors came asking for a true length to hang the harbour chain from. They wanted the cord cut to the distance from our quay to the moon. I climbed the tallow tower with a lamp and a plumb line, sure I could sound the sky the way my father sounded the bay. The moon, though, was only a paring of light over the water, and no line I owned would reach its edge without going soft in the wind.

The surveyors gave up by midsummer. Mirren died in the thaw, and I took her cord down because nobody else would. It ran eleven hundred yards before the last knot, and beside that knot someone had pitched a second name in black tar, in a hand I did not recognise. Mirren had never told me she had a partner in the measuring.

I sat on her step until the tide turned and worked out the sums. A cord walked out and back is twice its length, so whoever tied that knot had reached the moon and returned. I tied a fresh knot beside the stranger's name, pitched my own, and hung the cord on the nail where the lamp would catch it. The moon came up through the gate, pale as a fingernail, and for once it looked like it had been measured.