Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Profile woman with starry dripping hair and crescent moon

Black and grey · Flash

A woman faces right in profile, with her eye, nose and lips drawn in fine outline. Her long hair is a solid black silhouette speckled with small stars, dots and a crescent moon, and its lower edges melt into drips. The image uses flat black ink with a textured fill on a plain cream background, with no shading or colour.

Woman Profile Crescent moon Star Hair Dot Eye Lip

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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

The ink has thickened in the pot again, so you hold the bottle against your ribs to loosen it while the bell goes eight over black water. Mr Okonedo, the purser, wants the logbook fair copied before Lisbon, and you have only the one good nib left. The Atlantic has been heaving for nine days, and everything aboard has a faint salt crust, including your cuffs and the corners of your mouth.

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Up on the quarterdeck the sky has finally cleared. Nobody has seen the moon since Madeira, so when it rises thin as a paring knife's curl you climb up without being sent for. A bright star hangs over the mainmast. You name it after your sister, who swore the stars were holes where the light leaked through, and who went about with her hair always wet from the sea wind, as if she had been swimming in the dark.

Back in the chart room you try to draw that moon into the margin of the log. The ink spreads on the damp paper, the crescent bleeds into a smudge, and a thick drop runs off the edge of the ledger and down the side of the desk. You press the nib's tip into the blots to make stars, one, then another, until the page is speckled like a night sky that has been dropped.

Mr Okonedo finds you at the rail the next morning, holding the wet book out in both hands like something that fell from a tree. He doesn't scold. He studies the dripping black and the scatter of small white dots where the paper held, then says the log has never been so honest about the weather. By Lisbon the page has dried stiff, the moon is a pale hollow in it, and the only thing aboard still shining is the star you named.