Black ink drawing of a sun with a face and a crescent moon with a face, a tattoo design in engraved-style linework with dotwork and hatching.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Sun and crescent moon design

Traditional · Black and grey · Flash

A black ink drawing shows a sun with a human face and wavy rays, overlapping a crescent moon with its own face on the left. The linework is fine and even, with hatching and stippled dots shading the sun's disc and the moon's lower edge. The design is drawn in black on plain off-white paper, with a spiral sketchbook edge visible at the top left.

Traditional Dotwork Sun Moon Crescent moon Celestial Face Ray Dot Hatching

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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

No, don't look up yet. Keep your eyes on the chip shop sign till I've finished, because the pair of them never liked being stared at. Sit where the lamp reaches you, pet, and mind the wet step. Now. Every night over Ancoats the sun slides down behind the gasworks and the moon climbs up out of the canal, and for one hour neither of them has a job to do.

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The sun had a face in those days, a broad gold one that the mill girls swore was their own mother's. She could not stop looking at the moon. He was thin as a fingernail then and wore his face turned to the wall, because he had been told he was only a leftover. So every evening she flung her rays across the rooftops, long and wavy as unbraided hair, trying to reach him, and every evening they fell short against the chimneys.

One October the moon grew so bright with listening that the gasmen said the streetlamps went blue. He leaned out over Miller Street and said, I am not the leftover, I am the one who stays. The sun laughed so hard her rays rattled every window in the city. Then she saw he had pricked his own face into the dark with dots and fine lines, the way a lad scratches his initials into a bench, and she understood he had been working at it for years.

So they sat down together on the rim of the world, and that is why, when you look up tonight, there is a dark curve of moon tucked under the sun's arm like a child asleep. Right, the lamp's going out. Off you go, and don't look at the sun.