Small black and grey realistic moon tattoo with shaded craters on the side of a bare ribcage, beneath a raised arm.

Small moon tattoo on the ribs

Realism · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A small full moon is tattooed on the side of the torso, just below the underarm. The moon is shaded in soft greys, with darker patches suggesting craters and a subtle edge shadow. The bare skin is photographed against a plain white background, with the raised arm framing the tattoo.

Realism Ribs Moon Celestial Crater

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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 lamp was my father's job until his chest gave out, and after that it was mine, though the Board kept sending the paperwork to him because nobody on the mainland believed a girl of nineteen could be trusted with the wick. I kept the log anyway. Every night I wrote the wind, the visibility and the tide, and in the margin whatever the moon was doing, because he had taught me that a keeper who does not know the sky is only half a keeper.

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The moon that autumn was full for three nights running and so bright the gulls roosted on the gallery rail instead of the rock. On the second night I climbed up with the brass telescope Mr Eades had left in the store and lay on the boards with my cheek against the cold eyepiece. The craters rose out of the grey like thumbprints pressed into wet clay. I sketched them in pencil, the broad dark seas and the pitted rim of one I could not name, and I shaded the edge where the light gave out, the way my father had shown me with a stub of charcoal on the back of an old chart.

A boat came in on the third night, badly, with its own lamp out. I had to choose between the light and the water, and I chose the light, because the Board would have cared more about the lamp than a stranger's ankles. I heard the oars knock the rocks below and then a man's voice calling, and I did not go down. I kept turning the wick and calling the bearing through the speaking tube until the voice found the gap in the reef and went quiet.

In the morning there was a smudge on the page where I had cried, and beside the moon sketch, in my father's careful hand from years before, the old note he always left on drawings he thought were nearly right: Shade the far edge last.