Black linework tattoo of a pentagram inside a circle, with crescent moons and planetary symbols, on a person's upper back near the shoulder blade.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Pentagram and planetary symbols on a shoulder blade

Geometric · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A black linework pentagram sits inside a double outlined circle, with a crescent moon at the upper left and a smaller crescent in the centre. Several planetary and alchemical symbols are set within circles around the star, and a number 21 appears in one of them. The design is in black ink on pale skin, centred across the upper back.

Geometric Back Pentagram Circle Crescent moon Star

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The chalk ran thin on the third turn of the circle, so Ottilie knelt on the cold flags of the Vellmark observatory and went over the line with her thumb until the moon sat true again. Her master had drawn the pentagram in one stroke every night for twenty years, and he had never once let an apprentice near the outer ring. Tonight he lay propped against the lectern, coughing into a handkerchief, while the tallow guttered low in its dish.

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She set the metals where he had shown her: copper for the sign of Venus, iron for Mars, the grey lead of Saturn, and the quicksilver she was not to spill. The small crescent went in the centre, where the old star-maps said a sleeper's name should be written. Twenty-one nights, he had told her, for the lamp to burn without going out. She had counted them on the window ledge with a fingernail, and this was the twenty-first, and the wick had already been trimmed twice.

When the bell in the harbour tower struck midnight, she stepped inside the ring and the lines seemed to hold their breath. Nothing rose out of them. Only the flame steadied, and her master's breathing slowed, and Ottilie understood that the circle had never been for summoning anything at all. It was a way of keeping a light lit long enough for someone to find their way home through the fog. She closed the ring with one last careful stroke, and the crescent at its edge caught the flame like a sliver of silver.