Dotwork moon phase tattoos in black and grey across three fingers of a hand, with black nail polish.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Moon phases on three fingers

Dotwork · Hand · Black and grey · Photo

Three fingers each carry a moon in a different phase: a crescent, a half moon and a gibbous shape, outlined and lightly filled with white or pale skin tones. Surrounding each moon, fine black dots thicken toward the knuckle and thin out near the fingertip, creating a stippled, starry background. The work is entirely black and grey and is shown against a dark surface with glossy black nail polish.

Dotwork Hand Moon Moon phase Dot Star Finger

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 chronometer died somewhere off the Cape Verdes, so from then on it was the moon and me. Captain Harrow wanted our longitude by Thursday, and I had three nights of cloud to work with. Every evening I climbed to the mizzen top with my sextant case under one arm and waited for the sky to open like a bad purse.

Keep reading

Old Pell, the bosun, had taught me to read the moon the way other men read the news. Waxing crescent first, low in the west after supper, a thin white blade you could cut your thumb on. Then the half, then the lumpy gibbous that looked, he said, like a pudding someone had sat on. He kept a tally on the inside of his cap in pencil and never once got a date wrong.

On the fourth night the cloud tore open just after two bells in the middle watch. The stars came out in such thick handfuls that the dark between them looked like the grain of a board. I took my shots of the moon against Antares, wrote the times in the log with cold fingers, and worked the sums by the binnacle lamp while the sea hissed along the hull.

When I laid the figures on the chart, the ship sat exactly where Pell had always said she would, a degree and a half east of where Harrow reckoned. Nobody thanked me. Pell only tapped the chart, took the pencil from behind his ear and rubbed out one date on his cap, then wrote in the one that came after it.