Close photograph of a red moon tattoo with dark crater shading and a black outline, placed on the upper arm beside other dark tattoo work.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Red moon tattoo on an upper arm

Realism · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

A full moon is tattooed in red ink with darker grey and black patches suggesting craters, enclosed by a fine black outline. Soft shading gives the disc a rounded, dimensional look. Dark tattoo linework is partly visible at the top and bottom edges of the frame, and the moon sits centrally on the skin.

Realism Upper arm Moon Crater Celestial

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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

Sit down, the lot of you, and mind that spilt lemonade, because this is the night the moon bled over the Pavilion at Halsey Pier, and I was there with a borrowed shilling and shoes two sizes too tight. The gorse was burning up on the headland that summer, and the smoke came down over the bay like wet wool. When the moon finally rose through it, it came up the colour of a boiled beetroot, and old Mrs Doyle, who kept the cloakroom, locked both doors and said nobody goes home until the last waltz is played.

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Eddie Rance's band had one record left that the needle didn't skip on, so they played it over and over. Ruth Mallory, who was promised to a fisherman's son from Porthleven, danced most of the night with a stranger in a grey coat who never once looked at the window. When the needle finally dragged on the last turn, he said the moon was owed a dance for all the nights it had been watched and never asked. Ruth laughed at him. Then she looked up through the glass and saw the dark patches on that red face shifting slowly, like a crowd of people walking home.

The stranger was gone by morning, and nobody could say which door he'd used. The fisherman's son married someone sensible in the spring. Ruth never did marry, and she kept her dancing shoes by the window with the laces tied together. Every time the moon comes up that colour, she'd go out on the pier in her stockings, and if you stand close enough you can hear her humming the last waltz back up at it.