Three small black fine line tattoos: a sun and crescent moon on an ankle, a rose behind an ear, and a lotus on a toe with blue nail polish.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Sun and moon, rose and lotus tattoos

Fine line · Ankle · Black and grey · Photo

This collage shows three close-up photographs of small tattoos on different parts of the body. On the left, a sun and crescent moon sit on the ankle above a black canvas shoe, drawn in fine black linework with dotted rays. In the centre, a rose with a single leaf and stem is shaded in black and grey behind an ear, and on the right a lotus with layered petals is outlined in black on a toe with blue nail polish.

Fine line Botanical Ankle Other Sun Moon Rose Lotus Flower Leaf

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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

Tuesday, 14th March, 1889. Off the Cape Verdes, the wind gone soft as porridge. Mr Abernethy asked me again at breakfast whether the sun or the moon keeps better time for a man lost at sea. I told him neither, since the chronometer is what we trust, and he laughed the way he does when he has already decided I am wrong.

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Still, I have been watching the pair of them. Every dawn the sun lifts off the larboard bow like a coin pressed through wax, and every night the moon hangs over the rigging, thin as a paring from Mrs Pell's apple peel. My sister Ada pressed a rose into the back of my almanac before I sailed, flattened and brown, and said it would find its own way home if I ever forgot the road. I have not forgotten. The rose is still there between the tide tables, and I have kept a lotus seed from a Canton merchant in the tin with my tobacco.

The squall came at four bells in the middle watch. The chronometer slid off its bracket and cracked its glass, and for an hour there was no true time aboard the Marguerite but the one we made up between us. We steered by the last of the moon, a sliver so fine it could have been cut from a fingernail, and at first light the sun came up exactly where Captain Hale swore it would. Nobody said a word about the chronometer after that.

This evening I took the tin out and planted the lotus seed in a cup of seawater, just to see. Ada would say that is foolishness. Mr Abernethy will say the sun will bake it dead by Madeira. I have written the date on the cup's rim, and I will mark the next dawn with a pencil stroke in this book.