Black ink drawing of a sun and crescent moon with carved-style faces, dotwork mandala detail and wavy rays, shown as a tattoo design on paper.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Sun and crescent moon with faces

Dotwork · Black and grey · Flash

A pen drawing of a sun with a face in its centre, overlapping a crescent moon with a sleeping face on its left side. The sun has a triangle symbol on its forehead, and both bodies have radiating wavy rays and small dots scattered around them. Fine, even black linework with dotwork stippling and hatching in the moon's border and the sun's ornamental circles, all on a plain light background.

Dotwork Traditional Sun Moon Face Celestial Mandala Ray Dot Triangle

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The ship Hesper had been nine weeks out of Falmouth when the cook's boy began to count the sunsets wrong. He swore the sun had gone down on the wrong side of the mizzen, and the old pilot Amos Trewin only laughed until he looked up and saw the moon hanging low over the bow, still pale in the afternoon, with her eyes shut as if she had come up to sleep and forgotten to go down.

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The sun, Trewin said, had never once in his life stayed on one side of the sky. He had sailed under her for thirty years. She went around the world the long way, sometimes sweeping the whole deck with her hair of fire, and the moon followed her like a lamp carried by a servant who was afraid of the dark. Between them they had worn a path into the sea that no chart showed. The boy asked why they never met. Trewin said they met every day, only nobody looked.

On the thirtieth night the wind dropped and the sea went flat as a plate. The sun rose from the water with a triangle of light on her brow, and the moon, who had been dozing at the rail, opened one eye and found her close enough to touch. They did not speak. The moon simply turned her face, and the sun leaned in, and for the length of a held breath the two faces lay one over the other like a coin pressed into wax.

When the wind came back, the Hesper made Penzance in eleven days, and the boy swore the rays on the water had pointed them home. Trewin kept a drawing of it in his sea chest, the sun with her wavy hair and the moon asleep at her side, and he never once said which of them had let the other go.