Line drawing of a rayed sun with a dark centre above a crescent moon, joined by dotted lines and small star motifs, on a black background.

Sun and crescent moon with stars design

Black and grey · Flash

A white line drawing of a sun with flame-like rays surrounds a dark central disc with small circular highlights. Below it, a shaded crescent moon in grey and muted purple is linked to the sun by dotted lines ending in small star shapes. The design is set on a solid black background with a vertical composition.

Sun Moon Crescent Star Dotted line

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Pass me that twine, and mind the hook, it bites. No, sit where the light falls, I'll not tell this one in the dark. You want the sun and the moon, do you? Everybody on this quay knows the tale, but they tell it wrong, the way they tell the tide wrong.

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The sun in those days was a great hot wheel of a woman called Morwen, and she burned so fiercely that the fishing boats came home with their sails scorched brown and the gulls wouldn't land. She had a dark heart under all that brightness, a black stone at her core that nobody saw. The moon, a thin silver fellow with nothing to do but drift, lived on the far side of the bay and only caught her eye at dusk, when she was tired and the glare had gone off her.

Each evening he threw a line of stars down toward her, one bright knot after another, hoping she'd haul him in. Some dropped short and went out in the water. Some she caught, and she kept them about her like beads. That's why the dots run between them, you see, a string of little promises gone slack in the rigging.

Then one night the moon came round the headland and found her face turned away, and he understood at last that she'd been giving her light to the boats all along, letting her own middle go cold so the men could find the harbour. He hung there, thin as a paring, and did the only thing a moon can do. He dimmed himself to nothing so she could rest, and the fishermen steered home by the stars he'd left behind.