Small solid black blackwork tattoo of a row of moon phases in a gentle arc on the inner forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Moon phases arc on a forearm

Blackwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A row of eight solid black moon phases sits in a shallow arc across the inner forearm, moving from thin crescents at the left to a full circle near the centre and back to a crescent at the right. The shapes are filled with solid black ink with crisp edges and no shading. The skin is pale and the background is a dark leather surface, so the black ink stands out clearly.

Blackwork Forearm Moon Moon phase Crescent Full moon

Find an artist for this

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 painted moons on the ring curtain had been fading since Easter, and Dilys Crane counted them every evening before the house lights dimmed. Eight of them, set in a shallow curve above the entrance, running from a sliver on the left to a full round moon at the centre and back down to a sliver again. The black had been strong housepaint once. Now the edges were going grey where the damp crept in off the Severn, and the crescents looked less like the moon and more like the ghost of a moon.

Keep reading

Solomon Vane had sold the elephant and the two ponies in March. The man from the car park developer had already measured the field, and on Tuesday the takings came to eleven pounds and a bent sixpence. Dilys tallied it at the trestle table under a bare bulb, then took the tin of enamel from under the wagon steps. Nobody had asked her to paint anything. She simply climbed the ladder and began on the left, the thinnest crescent first, keeping her brush just inside each line so she would not overshoot the edge.

The full moon took the longest. A circle is hard to close when your wrist has been tired for forty years, and twice she wiped it clean and started again, until the disc sat black and round in the middle of the arc like something that had decided to stay.

Thursday's audience was nine people and a dog. The lamps caught the curtain as the band struck up, and a boy in the third row, too young to be sitting alone, leaned forward and counted the shapes with his finger. "Eight," he said, loud enough for the whole tent to hear, and Dilys drew back the curtain.