Line drawing of a sun with flame-like rays above a soft blue-tinted crescent moon, linked by dotted lines and small star shapes, with no body placement shown.

Sun and crescent moon design with stars

Fine line · Mixed · Flash

A sun with a blank face and a few small crater dots sits at the top, surrounded by wavy, flame-like rays drawn in fine dark linework. A crescent moon with a pale blue and green wash hangs below, with dotted lines and small four-point stars falling from both celestial bodies. The composition is centred on a white background with the design running vertically down the page.

Fine line Dotwork Sun Moon Crescent moon Star Dotted line Celestial

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

My father came up from the lamp room at half five with coal dust in the creases of his neck, and he found me on the wall above Hollin Row where I'd been waiting since the whistle. The sun sat low over the spoil heaps, a pale hard disc with its rays drawn out thin as wire, and the moon hung above the chapel roof, a fingernail of light nobody in the village had properly named. Gran said it was the sun's washing. Dad said it was a lamp someone had forgotten to switch off.

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Dotted lines ran from the sun's rim down to the moon, and that summer I counted them with a pencil stub on the back of a rent book. Forty-one from the sun, nineteen from the moon, each ending in a four-pointed star like the marks the deputy made on the board when a pony came up sound. Mr Pryce at the colliery office said the stars were simply the ones nobody had got round to drawing. I believed him for about a week.

The cage at Bell Meadow stuck in February with nine men below. The rescue ran three days in lamp smoke and cold water. On the fourth morning the sky cleared, and the moon stood over the headgear with its dark side plainly showing, the way it never did in winter. I walked up the wall and counted again. Forty-one still, and one new dot, faint as breath on glass, falling from the moon's lower horn toward the ground.

Dad came home on the Thursday grey to the lips and sat on the step while I chalked the picture on the flagstones: the sun, the moon, the thread of dots, and at the bottom a star with nothing to hang from. He studied it a long while. Then he took the chalk, filled the empty star in with four neat points, and said that was where Tommy Lowe would be, if anyone asked.