Two side-by-side photos of black ink tattoos: a sun with rays on the left and a small crescent moon on the right, both on the side of the torso.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Sun and crescent moon on the side body

Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

The left panel shows a solid black sun with a ring-shaped centre and spiky rays, set against skin partly covered by clear plastic wrap. The right panel shows a small, simple black crescent moon on a softly lit section of skin. Both images use bold black ink with clean edges, and the paired composition makes the two motifs easy to compare.

Ribs Sun Moon Crescent Ray

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Maud Tethery mended the bell ropes for three parishes and kept two pieces of horn in her apron pocket. One was cut round with a hollow in its middle, like an open eye with rays pricked around its rim. The other was pared thin into a curve. Nobody in Hollin's Edge thought this strange. Her cottage stood where the last field gave way to the forest, and folk there were used to a woman who carried light about with her.

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One November the rope in the chapel tower frayed through, and the sexton's boy, Jem Crake, came running down the lane with his cap in his fists. "Mistress, the bell's gone quiet and the rooks won't leave it." Maud took her satchel and both pieces of horn and climbed the tower without a word. At the top she held the hollow sun up to the grey sky and said the sun was the sort of thing that could only be looked at, never taken into a hand. Then she tied the new rope with the knots her mother had taught her, and rang the bell once so the whole valley turned its head.

Jem asked why she kept the moon, when the moon was only the sun's leftover light. Maud laughed and said that was what the moon told everybody, because it was too proud to admit it had an edge of its own. She gave him the curve of horn and told him to hang it on the nail by the door. "Something has to keep the dark steady while the sun is away."

That night Jem hung the crescent on the nail. In the morning the horn was gone, and in its place lay the hollow sun, wedged in the cleft of an oak at the forest's edge where the frost had not yet reached. Jem did not touch it. He went home the long way, past the tower, and heard the new rope knock softly against the wall in the wind.