Two photos side by side showing a small solid black crescent moon tattoo, fine line style, on the inner wrist in black and white and on the upper back in a warm sepia tone.

Small crescent moon on wrist and upper back

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

The left photo shows a small, solid black crescent moon on the inner wrist of a clenched hand against a plain pale wall. The right photo shows a similar crescent moon on the upper back of a person with long blonde hair, wearing a yellow patterned strappy top, in warm sepia tones. Both tattoos are tiny, with clean single-line shading and no colour, and sit low in the frame.

Fine line Forearm Back Moon Crescent

Find an artist for this

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 Mary Anne was two hours overdue when Ruth Calder lit the harbour lamp, and the moon was no more than a paring over the Ness. Her father had taught her that a crescent that thin set low and took its light with it, so the men had to be home before it went under. She cranked the lamp up and down the way he had shown her, long, short, long, and kept her eyes on the black water between the breakwater stones.

Keep reading

Nobody in Skerrow Haven would say the moon had a hand in it. They said the boats came home when the sky allowed, and that was all. But the old women kept a pewter spoon on the sill in every house, bent into a crescent by some grandmother's hand, and they turned it face up on the nights the fleet was out. Ruth's mother had one. Ruth had never asked where it came from.

At half past three the lamp caught a sail, then a second, then the hull of the Mary Anne sliding in on the flood with her nets dripping silver. Her skipper, Tam Greig, came up the slip with his cap in one hand and a cut across the other palm bound in oilskin. He did not speak of the rocks off the Ness. He asked for the spoon.

Ruth fetched it from the sill and put it in his good hand. He turned it over once, then laid it on the wall where the lamplight fell. Tomorrow, she thought, the moon would be thicker, and the fleet would go out in the dark again, because that was how the fish came. She wrote the night in the tide book herself, in her father's careful hand, and drew a small curved line beside the Mary Anne's name.