Black and grey dotwork tattoo of a sun and crescent moon with hanging drops, centred on a person's upper back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Sun and crescent moon with dangling drops on upper back

Dotwork · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A sun with flame-like rays sits above a crescent moon, and both are linked by strings of dots and hanging teardrop pendants. The sun is drawn in fine linework with stippled dot shading, while the moon is filled with dense dotwork that gives it texture. The image is black and grey, shot from behind with the subject's head cropped at the top of the frame and a blurred studio background.

Dotwork Fine line Back Sun Moon Crescent moon Celestial Pendant Drop Sun rays Dot

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mo Halloran strung the last of the glass drops from the sun hoop while the afternoon went grey over the Pontefract field. Forty-one drops, two of them cracked, and he wrapped each cracked one in a strip of old programme before hanging it where the audience wouldn't look. The show was down to six performers, a goat called Duchess and a ringmaster who now sold the teas. Nobody could remember when the big top had last been full.

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The banner above the ring had been painted by Mo's late wife, Ivy, the summer they bought the tent off a bankrupt circus in Hull. She had given the sun flame-tipped rays and set the crescent moon below it on a swing of silver chain, so that the two seemed to be passing a secret between them. Mo had never had the heart to repaint it, even when the gold leaf flaked off the sun and left it looking like a tarnished coin.

Nell, the wire walker's girl, came in with a bucket of paraffin and asked why they bothered with the drops at all when there would be twelve people on the benches, if that. Mo told her the moon needed something to catch the light. She didn't believe him, but she held the ladder while he climbed.

At seven the sign-in tent gave up its count: eleven, and a dog. Mo lit the lamps regardless. When the hoop began to turn, the drops swung and caught the flames, and small bright coins of light slid across the empty benches, over the goat, and up into the dark roof of the tent, where the moon rocked gently on its chain.