Black ink line drawing of a sun with a sleeping face and wavy hatched rays, overlapping a crescent moon with a closed-eyed face on a white background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Sun and crescent moon with faces

Black and grey · Flash

The drawing shows a sun with a closed-eyed face and wavy, hatched rays radiating to the left, with a crescent moon with a closed-eyed face partly behind it on the right. The linework is fine and dense, using hatching and contour lines to shade the rays and give them texture. The design is monochrome on a plain white background, with the sun dominant in the left half and the crescent moon sweeping around its right edge.

Sun Moon Crescent moon Celestial Face Ray

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Tuesday. Mr Pellow wants the sign finished by Friday, and he wants both faces asleep. I told him the moon has never slept a night in its life, it just keeps out of sight where nobody can complain about it. He said the Sun and Moon is a public house, not a planetarium, and customers who have been stared at by the sun all day don't want the moon watching them over their halves. So I have closed their eyes with two fine strokes each, the way you'd settle a child, and left the rest to the rays.

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The rays took all of Monday. I hatched them with a number two nib and Indian ink, one wave laid over another, until the sun looked as if it were blowing gently to the left, away from the moon. The moon I kept plain, one clean sweep of contour round the sun's right edge, because a crescent needs little to look like it is leaning in. Mother used to say the sun gets all the glory and the moon does all the watching. I didn't repeat that to Pellow. He would only have wanted it painted on the back of the board.

This morning he climbed the ladder with his pipe unlit and stood a long while under the sign. Then he asked why the lower rays had gone so faint. I said the ink ran dry, which was half true. The other half is that I stopped there because I thought of the landing light at home going off at ten, and how we all called it bedtime when it was really just a quieter sort of waiting.

He nodded at the paint for a while longer. Then he said the sun could do with a rest too, and paid me for the Friday before I had finished the ladder.