Black and grey realism tattoo of a moon with a human face and a metal capsule lodged in its eye, on the upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Moon with a face and capsule on upper arm

Realism · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A large moon with a carved-looking human face and a cylindrical capsule embedded in its left eye sits on the upper arm of a person wearing a grey top. The moon's surface uses fine, soft shading with crater detail and highlights, while the face and capsule are rendered with strong contrast and realistic texture. The image is entirely black and grey, framed closely on the arm against a pale, softly lit background.

Realism Upper arm Moon Face Crater

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

You have kept the night watch at Tranquillity Rest for eleven years, and in all that time the Moon has never once looked at you directly. Its face is turned toward the Earth, as it always is, and the capsule still sits in its left eye like a cork in a bottle, the brass gone green at the rim. Tourists photograph it from the shuttle bay. The children on the Sunday tours are told it is the shell that woke the old man up, and you let them believe it, because the true version involves a tin of boot polish and a very long argument with a contractor.

Keep reading

The job is mostly listening. The relay at Port Lacuna hums through the small hours, and the grit that drifts across the crater floor sounds like someone brushing their teeth in the next room. Every ninth night the old capsule ticks. You have logged it forty-one times in the ledger, under a column headed simply Eye, and nobody upstairs has ever asked why. Nobody else sits out here with a flask of tea and the long black quiet, waiting for a clock that was made before anyone had a word for orbit.

Tonight the tick comes with a voice, thin as a gramophone playing through a wall. Still there? it asks, in the careful English of a man who has practised it on the way down. You say yes, because the regulations say you must answer anything that speaks from the eye. He wants to know whether the Earth is still blue. You tell him it is, mostly, and that there are lights on the dark side now that would make him weep. He is quiet for a while. Then he asks whether anyone ever came back for the hat.

You look at the ledger, at the long column of ticks, and tell him no. Nobody came back. But you pour a second cup of tea, carry it to the ridge, and set it down on the dust where the sunlight falls across the brass. When you turn round, the crater-lidded eye has lifted a fraction, and the capsule is catching the sun like a wink.