Pencil sketch of a flaming sun behind a crescent moon, with script lettering across the moon and stars scattered below, drawn as a tattoo design.

Sun and crescent moon with script lyric

Black and grey · Flash

A pencil drawing of a flaming sun with long wavy rays set behind a crescent moon. The moon's face carries six lines of cursive script, and small stars and dotted trails fall from its lower right edge. The shading is soft grey, with the rays and crescent edge drawn in darker, heavier strokes on a pale background.

Sun Moon Crescent Flame Star Script Lettering Lyric

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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 lift has been dead since Tuesday, so you climb the stairwell of Harcourt House with a carrier bag of shopping cutting into your fingers, counting landings by the paint peeling off their numbers. On the eleventh floor someone has taped a sheet of printer paper to the wall: a moon lying on its back over a sun that has forgotten how to be gentle, flames drawn in heavy pencil, little stars falling off the bottom edge like sparks. Underneath, in careful joined-up writing, a line is copied out, crossed through, then copied again.

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You stop, because you recognise the handwriting. Mrs Okafor on the fourth floor taught half the estate to write their names in cursive at the community centre, and she used to say a loop should never be rushed. This one has been rushed, the letters leaning into each other like people waiting for the bus.

You don't knock. You take the drawing down, fold it into the bag between the bread and the tins, and carry it up the last two flights as if it might spill. At the top, the stairwell window faces west, where the sky is going the colour of weak tea above the car park and the ring road beyond. Someone has propped the roof door open with a brick.

Out there the wind tugs at your coat. You unfold the drawing against the railing and hold it up to the last of the light, so the moon and the sun line up over the rooftops, and you find the crossed-out line is still legible underneath. Stay, it says. Stay, and you feel your shoulders drop.