Line drawing flash design of a silhouetted figure on a crescent moon above a latticed heart and two roses with leaves, in a traditional style, with no body placement shown.

Silhouette figure on crescent moon with heart and roses

Traditional · Black and grey · Flash

The design shows a solid silhouetted figure in profile standing before a large crescent moon, with a heart at the base that has a lattice-patterned inner panel and a central gem-like circle. Two open roses with shaded leaves sit beneath the heart, with a pair of wing-like shapes at its sides. It is a black ink outline drawing on a cream background with no colour, and the composition is symmetrical and centred.

Traditional Silhouette Figure Crescent moon Heart Lattice Rose Leaves Wing Gem

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The harbour at Sallow Reach had a rule that nobody went out past the breakwater when the moon was thin, and Marta Penrose broke it the winter her brother's boat failed to come home. She took her grandmother's lantern down the slipway at dusk, the wick trimmed short, and rowed out with the tide running hard against the oars.

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Out past the bell buoy the water went flat and grey as pewter. A woman stood on the surface there, or seemed to, black as a cut-paper figure against the sky, her skirts gathered in one hand. Beneath the moon she wore a heart of carved wood at her throat, its panel crossed with a lattice like a fisherman's net, and a single stone set in its centre that gave back the lantern light.

Marta did not ask her name. The woman lifted the heart from her neck and let it drop into the water, where it opened like a rose unfolding and drew a line of light across the swell. Two dark shapes followed it up, one, then another, rolling in the wake: a pair of boats, low in the water, their oars still moving as if pulling for home.

Her brother's skiff came in on the morning ebb with nobody aboard, its bow wrapped in weed and a crust of salt on the transom. Marta kept the stone in her apron pocket for the rest of her life and never rowed past the buoy again. On thin-moon nights she set her lantern on the sill facing out, and waited for the net-patterned light to come back across the water.