Two small fine line tattoos on forearms in a sepia photo: a crescent moon on the left arm and a sun with rays on the right.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Matching moon and sun tattoos on forearms

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

Two small black tattoos sit on the forearms of two arms placed side by side against a dark background. The left shows a thin crescent moon outline, and the right shows a simple sun with a ring and short rays, both drawn in fine, even linework. The sepia-toned photo shows the ink as black with no colour.

Fine line Forearm Moon Crescent Sun Celestial

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

No, sit down, the kettle can wait, because you asked about the two of them and I am not telling it twice. Ada and Mercy Pell shipped out of Hull on the Corran Light in the spring of 1862, both of them fourteen and both of them lying about it to the bosun. The sun was Ada's. She had the day watch, could read a sextant better than the mate, and used to say the sun was honest because you could see him coming.

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Mercy had the night. She kept the lamp trimmed in the binnacle and sang the star names under her breath so the helmsman would not drift off. Off the Horn in the fourth month they lost the chronometer to seawater, and for nine days the only clock aboard was the two of them, one going up as the other came down. Ada worked the noon sights by daylight and handed the figures down the ladder to Mercy, who wrote them in pencil on the back of a psalter, because the captain would not let a girl near the log book.

On the tenth night the cloud broke and there was the moon, thin as a fishhook, and Mercy said it was the first time she had ever seen the moon look like it was hunting for something. Ada laughed and said it was only out of practice. They reckoned their position off that sliver and the stars, and it was within two leagues of the truth when the land came up grey through the rain.

When the Corran berthed at Valparaíso, the two of them had a sailmaker's needle and a bottle of lamp black fetched to their bunk, and one moon and one sun were pricked into their forearms, so that whichever of them was on deck, the other would always know where to look.