Black and grey fine line and dotwork tattoo of a row of moon phases, a diamond and a small star on the inner forearm.

Moon phases and star on a forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A black and grey tattoo on a forearm shows a diamond shape at the top, a central dotted circle, and a row of crescent moon phases sweeping down to each side. A thin vertical line runs down to a small eight-point star and a dot, with stippled dots forming a fan shape between the moons. The shading is done with fine stippling and crisp single-needle linework on a pale, evenly lit background.

Fine line Dotwork Forearm Moon phase Moon Star Diamond Dot Celestial

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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

Turn that lamp down a notch, lad, the glare makes the sea look like a ledger, and I want you to see the dots the way Bell's cook saw them. No, leave the star alone. It's the one thing aboard that never lied to us.

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The Ilse Marrow was fourteen days out of Hull with a crew of eleven and a steward called Abel Tennant who couldn't swim a stroke. Each night, when the sky was clear, Abel went up to the galley beam with a chalk stub and drew one crescent beside the last, waxing, then full, then waning again. He said a man could lose his sense of the week at sea but never the moon. Fourteen crescents on that beam, and the wind dropped dead on the fifteenth night. We sat becalmed with no horizon at all, only the moon climbing slow out of the black water.

That's where the diamond comes in. Bell's father had ground the glass in a brass sextant that hung at the masthead, and when the moon caught it, it threw a little lozenge of light across the deck that went round like a hand on a clock. The crew took it for a sign and quarrelled over which way it pointed. Abel, meanwhile, flung the last of the ship's salt into the lee to keep the rats honest, and the wind came back in a shiver just as the grains hit the rail, scattering them into a fan of tiny pale points across the wake.

We steered by the small eight-pointed star low over the bow after that, because the moon kept changing its mind and the star never did. We raised the Falklands on the twenty-second morning. Abel never drew another crescent, and when someone asked him why, he said he'd counted enough of what the sky took away. So when you ask me whether the moon is a liar, I'll tell you what he told me: it only ever shows you the half it can spare.