White line drawing of a sun with wavy rays framing a dark moon, with dotted chains and stars hanging below a crescent moon on a black background, shown as a tattoo design with no body placement.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Sun and crescent moon design

Fine line · Black and grey · Flash

The drawing shows a sun with a dark centre ringed by spiky, wavy rays, with a crescent moon beneath it. Dotted chains and small four-pointed stars hang from the sun and link down to the lower moon. The work is rendered in white and light grey linework and stipple on a solid black background, with no colour.

Fine line Dotwork Sun Moon Crescent moon Star Celestial Chain 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

By ten o'clock the whole of Saltery Lane had spilled onto the pavement, squinting through pieces of smoked glass that Mr Pell had been selling from the chemist's window at a shilling a time. My father would not look. He stood in the doorway of the chain works with his arms folded and told me the sun had never once needed watching, and that men who stared at it went blind for their trouble.

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I had spent the week making stars. The foreman let me have the brass offcuts from the bench, and at dinner break I bent them into four points with a pair of snips and strung them on fine wire that I hung from a nail above my stool. By Thursday it was a long dotted line, stars spaced between the little rings like a rosary someone had abandoned halfway through. I told nobody what it was for. I was not sure myself.

At twenty past eleven the birds stopped. The light went thin and grey, then the edge of the sun was gone and only a black disc sat in the sky with a ragged fringe of fire around it, spiky and bright as a dandelion clock. Somebody on the corner began to hum. Mr Pell took his glass away and wiped it on his waistcoat, and for a minute I could see the thing properly, the dark heart of it and the crescent of moon hanging beneath like a sickle left out in the rain.

When the light came back, it came the way it had gone, one thread at a time. My father walked across the yard without his apron, lifted my wire from its nail and hooked both ends onto the lamp bracket so the stars swung and caught the last of the glare. He said nothing about it, which from him was as good as a blessing, and went back to his fires.