Black and grey dotwork and fine line tattoo of a sequence of moon phases stacked vertically on a forearm, with a smaller matching version on the other arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Moon phases tattoo on both forearms

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

The photograph shows two forearms, each with a vertical stack of circular moon phases linked by a thin dot-and-line axis. The larger left forearm carries three moons: a crescent, a stippled full moon with crater texture, and another crescent, while the smaller right forearm repeats the sequence. Outlines are fine and precise, the shading is built from dense dots, and the ink is entirely black and grey against a pale, neutral background.

Fine line Dotwork Forearm Moon Moon phase Crescent moon Full moon Circle Line

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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

Day forty-one out of Valparaíso, and the chronometer is still sulking in its box. Captain Hale says we can carry on by dead reckoning until the coast shows itself, and I have said nothing, because I have been counting the moon instead and I am fairly sure I am right.

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Last night the crescent hung low in the west, thin as a fingernail, and I wrote it down the way Mr Ashdown taught me: a ring with a bite taken out of it. The full moon came the following week, a grey pitted disc I drew by lamplight with a pen that kept spitting. Between them the dots of the lunar seas ran out into soft shadow. He said the eye fills in what the pen cannot, and I did not believe him until I saw Tomas trace the phases up his own forearm with his thumb, the way the men do when they are waiting for the watch.

The Captain came down at the change of the watch with his lamp and his jaw set. He had worked out the same count on the back of a biscuit tin. Three quarters waxing, full, then a fresh crescent, which gave us eleven days since the last clean sight of the stars, and so the coast lay roughly where I had guessed. He did not say well done. He pulled a pencil from behind his ear and put a small dot beneath my last ring, as if it were a mark in a sum.

We raised the headland at dawn, grey and close, and the moon had already slipped into the morning, a pale rind over the water. I keep thinking about that dot. Some nights the sky gives you only a line to follow, and the rest you have to draw yourself.