Black and grey engraved-style tattoo of a crescent moon and a sun, each with a face, surrounded by stars, on a person's upper back.

Moon and sun face tattoo on upper back

Back · Black and grey · Photo

A round tattoo shows a crescent moon with a face in profile on the left and a sun with a face on the right, with four-pointed stars scattered between them. The linework uses fine hatching and stippled shading, giving an etched, vintage engraving look. The design is black and grey on pale skin, centred on the upper back, with the person's back and hair framing it from behind.

Back Moon Sun Star Celestial Face

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Ada Penrose had been cutting the almanac plates for her uncle's printing house since the spring her hands stopped shaking, and she knew the sun was a difficult face. Every week the compositor wanted it on the right, looking out over the margin, and every week she gave him a sun that squinted, because a sun that squints is one that has been up too long. The moon she could do in her sleep. Crescent, profile, a small sharp nose, mouth pressed shut as if it had something unsaid and was keeping it.

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The plate for the March number was the worst. Her uncle wanted the two of them on one circle, sharing it, the way the old Dutch almanacs did, and she spent four nights with the burin under the lamp, hatching the rays in fine lines that rose out of the sun's hair and bent back over the moon's brow. The stars she punched in with a dot tool, four points each, nine of them, because nine was what would fit above the border. Her uncle came in on the fifth night, looked at the plate for so long she thought he had fallen asleep standing up, and then went out without a word.

When the proofs came off the press in the morning, she saw what she had done without meaning to. The sun's eye, cut so carefully, was turned toward the crescent. The moon had tipped its face the same few degrees, as if it had been listening all along. Ada wiped the ink from her fingers on her apron and laid the sheet on the bench, and for once the squint had gone out of the sun entirely.