Fine line black crescent moon tattoo on a forearm, filled with lace-like patterns, leaves and swirls.

Ornate crescent moon on a forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A crescent moon sits on the forearm, with its outer edge outlined in a fine black line. The thick curve is filled with a lattice of small repeating shapes and scrolling tendrils, and a cluster of leaves and dots grows inward from the left side. The design is in black ink only, shown against pale skin on a plain light background.

Fine line Botanical Forearm Crescent moon Moon Leaves Swirl Dot Ornamental

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 fair pitched on Hollin Meadow the week the moon went thin, and Mother Tansy sent me up the ladder with a tin of silver paint and a list of complaints. The big crescent over the Wheel had flaked to grey, and she said the whole midway looked like it had been left out in the rain. I scraped the lattice clean with a bent nail while the generator coughed below us and the candy floss man swore at a gull.

Keep reading

The lattice was the hard part. Someone long dead had cut the pattern into the tin as tiny repeating kites, and every kite had to be picked out by hand. Tansy hummed while I worked, a tuneless thing about a girl who planted ivy in a bucket. When I asked where the song came from, she said the ivy grew from the piece of moon that broke off years ago and was buried under the Dodgems so the rides would keep their luck. I laughed until I scraped down to the leaves on the inside curve and found real green paint under the grey, fresh as if somebody had done it that morning.

We worked until the lamps came on along the midway. When the last kite shone, Tansy climbed up beside me, out of breath, and laid her palm flat against the tin. The moon gave a low hum under her hand, like a cable taking weight. 'There,' she said. 'Now it knows where we are.' Then she handed me the brush and told me to finish the curls at the tip of the horn, the bit that always goes first.

On Saturday the moon burned white over the fair, and the Wheel stopped at the very top and held there for a whole minute, so every rider could see the leaves.