Small fine line tattoo of a sun with a flame-like outline beside a crescent moon, in dark ink on the inner wrist of a forearm.

Sun and crescent moon on a wrist

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A small outline tattoo of a sun with a ring centre and spiky rays sits beside an open crescent moon on the inner wrist. The linework is thin and uniform, with little or no shading, and the ink reads as dark blue or black against pale skin. The photograph is taken close up, with a knitted white sleeve cuff at the bottom of the frame and a blurred blue background.

Fine line Forearm Sun Moon Crescent moon Celestial Outline

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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 Tollers' boarding house on Marrow Lane had one rule that nobody under forty ever believed: the guests took their breakfast at six, before the sun cleared the chimney stacks, and they did not ask why the kettle was already warm. You were the new girl that October, sent down from Leeds with a cardboard case and a cousin's recommendation, and Mrs Toller put you on the dawn rota because the last girl had walked out without notice and left a row of unpolished spoons. You learned the spoons. You learned the stairs that creaked on the third step only. You learned that the lodger in room four took his eggs boiled for exactly four minutes and never once looked up.

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It was the spoons that brought you to the back scullery one morning, a bright cold one, with the tide all the way out and the mudflats shining like pewter. Mrs Toller was there already, sleeves pushed up, scrubbing a tin tray with a tuft of wire wool. She didn't turn round. She said the sun had come up early over the water, and the moon had not yet gone home, and that a house like this needed both of them on the same shift or nothing kept its hours. Then she handed you the tray and told you to count the rays on the old sign above the door before you went out to fetch the milk.

You went out. You counted twelve rays on the painted sun above the step, each one spiked like a flame, and a thin crescent beside it, open towards the sea as if it had been drawn in a hurry. You thought it was only decoration until the milkman came up the lane with his cart, glanced at the pair of them, and touched two fingers to his cap.

That evening, when the last guest had gone up, you tipped a little blue ink from the pen you used for the ledgers and drew the same pair on the inside of your wrist, where you could feel your own pulse under the nib. In the morning the sun was up at six, and the moon, you swear it, was still hanging pale above the mudflats, waiting for its turn.