Realistic colour tattoo of a red-orange moon with dark grey craters on the upper chest, near the collarbone.

Red moon on upper chest

Realism · Chest · Mixed · Photo

A full moon with visible craters and maria is drawn in the centre of the frame, on the upper chest near the collarbone. The shading is soft and blended, with grey and black patches for the dark areas and a warm orange and pink glow across the rest of the disc. The subject sits centrally against plain skin, with a white open-necked shirt and a thin chain necklace framing the area.

Realism Chest Moon Celestial Crater

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The rain had been falling on Wenlock market for nine days when Mother Ashby took the moon down from its hook under the awning and wrapped it in oilcloth. Nobody argued. She had been selling the dark bits of it all week, a grey thumbful at a time, and the stallholders had grown used to the smell of wet tin and the sight of her thumbs stained rust-red. Nell came last, when the lamps were guttering, with a copper coin tied in wool and a face that had not slept.

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"The one that went red over the marsh," Nell said. "My father wants to see it."

Ashby unwrapped the oilcloth just enough to show the disc. It was no bigger than a cartwheel hub, and the seas on it were grey and black, the old names still legible in the shadow. Warm light leaked from its edges, orange where it met the rim and pink where it swelled in the middle, as if something under the surface had been burning slowly since the eclipse year. "The grey is the water that pooled when the night was young," Ashby said. "The glow is the dyer's boy, who walked into the marsh the autumn it went red and never walked out. Take it. Give me one night of looking, and bring it back before the rain stops."

Nell carried it home under her shawl, the rain drumming on the cloth like impatient fingers. At the kitchen table she unwrapped it, and the room filled with a colour like the inside of a shell. The craters were small and round, pressed in like thumbprints in wet clay. Her father stood up very slowly and did not speak. She hung the moon from a nail above the window, and for one hour the rain stopped, and the whole village came out to stand in the lane with their faces turned up.

In the morning the disc was cold and grey again, and the dyer's widow was waiting at the stall with her coin already in her hand. Nell, who had watched her mother's face all night, did not argue either. She only asked what the widow would give her for an hour of rain stopping.