Black line-art sheet titled Moon Glyphs, showing labelled symbols such as Hope, Fire and Water above a row of moon phase designs from new moon to waning crescent.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Moon glyphs and phase symbols design sheet

Black and grey · Flash

A black line-art reference sheet titled Moon Glyphs, with rows of small symbols that have dot accents and are each labelled with a word such as Hope, Earth, Fire, Water, Death or Will. The lower rows show moon phases, from new moon and full moon to the waxing and waning crescents, drawn as simple circles with crescent and half shading. The linework is even and clean on a plain white background, with no shading or colour.

Moon Glyph Symbol Crescent Full moon Circle Star Triangle Spiral Sword Horse Crown

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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

Come closer, you with the lantern, and mind the guy rope. Mother Ashdown painted these symbols on the board herself, the year the big wheel burned, and she would not let a single line be smudged. See the new moon there, with its two little dots either side? That's the night the moon goes missing from the sky, and the old fairground folk never pitched a tent on it. Nobody wanted to be found by a stranger when the dark was that thick.

Keep reading

Now the crescent, the waxing one. That's when the moon is learning to be a boat, half of her, then more. Ashdown's boy Tobias carried that board from Hull to Penzance on the back of a hay wagon, rain on the paint every night, and still it held. He used to say the glyphs were the moon's own alphabet, and that Fire and Water and Earth were only words she borrowed to talk to the carousel horses.

The trouble came in the autumn of the long frost. The horse glyph, the one with its two dots tucked beneath, went missing from the board one morning. Tobias swore nobody had touched it. The horses were found standing in a ring, all facing the full moon circle, as plain as the paint. Tobias went out with a brush and a pot of black and drew it back in before sunrise, dot for dot, and he never told anyone what the horses had been asking for.

So when you hear the wheel stop and think the night is over, look up. If the moon hangs round and full above the dark field, the glyphs are still keeping their watch. Mind you pay the penny at the gate.