Black and grey dotwork design in a circle showing a sun on the left, a mountain range and pine trees, and a crescent moon with stars on the right.

Sun and moon over mountains in a circle

Dotwork · Black and grey · Flash

A circular design split down the middle: the left half shows a pale sun with stippled shading and a mountain ridge, while the right half is solid black with white dots for stars and a crescent moon. The mountains and pine trees are built from stipple dots, while the night sky uses fine white marks on a dark ground. The composition is balanced and symmetrical, with the sun and moon placed on opposite sides.

Dotwork Sun Moon Star Mountain Pine tree Night sky Circle

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, the lot of you, and mind the embers, because this is the tale of how the two halves of Harrow Col learned to share a valley. Before the domes went up, the ridge the grandmothers call the Spine lay across the land like a blade on a table, with the morning on one side and the night on the other. Nobody lived on the sunny slope then, and nobody lived on the dark one either, not properly.

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Then came Ottilie Vane with forty seed-boxes and a dog called Pim, and she set her first lamp on the saddle of the ridge. Her daughter asked her why she would do such a daft thing, and Ottilie said a ridge only divides the people who refuse to climb it. So they climbed. Pines came up the slopes in spring, dark little spikes of them, and the barley grew gold under the sun while the ground beneath the stars went silver with frost. Every autumn the two halves sent a cart of each over the Spine to the other, and every autumn somebody complained about the weight.

In the third winter Pim died, and the lamp guttered out for a whole night. The valley came up the path in the cold to find out why. Ottilie's grandson, a boy with soot on his fingers from mending the wicks, stood at the saddle with the dead lamp in his hands and pointed at the sky. The sun had gone behind the peaks and the moon hung half-lit above the pines, and he said that between them they had never once been in the same place at the same time, yet the valley had never been dark. The old people said nothing for a long while after that.

The Crescent Gate still stands on that saddle, and above the hall door there is a carved sign showing a sun on one side and a moon on the other, with the mountain between them. Every child in Harrow Col is brought to look at it. Mind your footing on the way down.