Sun and crescent moon on a forearm

Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A single-needle outline of a sun with a plain circle and triangular rays, set against a crescent moon. The crescent is filled with swirls, dotted panels and diagonal stripes, while the sun is left open. The tattoo is in black ink on pale skin, photographed at a slight angle with a beaded bracelet visible above it.

Forearm Sun Moon Crescent Swirl Ray Stripe 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

Mind the step, it's loose, always was. Now, you want the one about the two lamps that hung over Hollins Lane, or the one about my uncle's bees? The lamps, then, because the bees don't like being told about twice. Every summer the sun went down behind the chapel and left its round ember hanging in the sky, and the crescent moon came up the other side, thin as a paring from Mrs Dunning's apple tree. Nobody thought the two of them had anything to say to each other. They were always in the wrong half of the day.

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The spring the old wall came down, my grandmother took the rubble and laid out a border of clay pots, one for each hour she could count from the kitchen window. She painted every pot with rays, little tongues of colour pointing outward, because she said a sun ought to look like it was reaching for something. The moon she left to the frost. Frost is patient. It drew its own patterns across the glass each morning, spirals and dotted lace and stripes where the light caught the cold, and she would stand there with her tea going cold and copy them into the margin of her seed book.

That is all I know of it, really. Some evenings, if the sky is clear and you are sitting out where the lane meets the hedge, you will see the two of them close enough to touch, the ring of rays and the lace-edged half-moon, and you will think they have been waiting all this time for somebody to notice. Pass me that jug, would you. My throat's gone dry on the telling.