Black and grey fine line tattoo of a compass rose with a sun and crescent moon face, placed on the upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Sun and crescent moon compass on upper arm

Fine line · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A compass rose with N and S markers and dotted rays surrounds a sun with a human face and a crescent moon face sitting within it. The linework is fine and dark, with stippled dots along the rays and light shading on the sun's flares. The tattoo is shown centred on a pale arm against a black sleeve, with a blurred interior in the background.

Fine line Dotwork Upper arm Sun Moon Compass Compass rose Arrow Face Dot

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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 hall still smells of floor polish and tinned peaches, and the name badges on the trestle table are the same sticky labels the school used for sports day. You find Priya's before your own. Someone has written her name in capitals and drawn a small sun beside it, the way she used to doodle on everything, even the back of her maths homework. You stand there holding a paper cup of squash that tastes faintly of the cupboard it came out of, and you try to decide whether to pretend you haven't seen her yet.

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The two of you were sun and moon in the Year Nine play, the only pair who wanted the parts badly enough to share one cardboard disc with a face cut out of the middle. She brought a brass compass from the geography room and told you north was the only direction that never moved. You believed her the way you believed everything she said before the summer her family left for Leeds and the letters stopped arriving in March.

Across the room she is laughing with a man in a rugby shirt, and she catches your eye over his shoulder. Neither of you waves. You walk over with the squash going warm in your hand and offer it to her like a peace treaty. She takes it. For a moment you stand in the exact places a needle would point if you laid the compass between you, sun to moon, neither of you quite north.

In the car park she tells you she still keeps the cardboard face in a shoebox under her bed. You tell her you still have the compass, though the glass has cracked and the needle sticks. Neither of you says which one of you was the sun. You leave the question in the cold air between the cars, where it can settle the way a needle does, once you stop walking.