Two matching forearm tattoos in black ink: a sun with a face and dotted chain drapery on the left arm, and a crescent moon with a face on the right arm, in a dotwork style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Sun and moon tattoos on two forearms

Dotwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

The left forearm shows a sun with a stylised face, surrounded by wavy rays and hanging dotted chains with small pendant drops. The right forearm shows a crescent moon with a profile face, a dotted chain drape and a shaded, textured edge. Both designs use fine outlines, stipple and dotwork detail in black and grey ink against natural skin tone, and they are photographed side by side.

Dotwork Forearm Sun Moon Face Chain Celestial Crescent Ray Drapery

Find an artist for this

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 eastern reflector had seized an hour before dawn, and Tamsin Okafor-Reid had until the second bell to free it or watch the ring's morning go grey. She lay on her back under the drive housing with the torch between her teeth. Above her, painted on the shutter panel by some crew who had lived and died before the ring had a name, the sun looked down with heavy-lidded eyes and wavy rays combed flat against the metal.

Keep reading

Her grandmother had called those dotted chains drapery. "Every weight wants a hanging," she used to say, tapping the little drops on the sun's pendant with a fingernail, "or it swings and takes the whole sky with it." Tamsin had thought it fussy nonsense. Now she traced the chain down from the housing to the counterweight and found it bound with a sticky cuff of old lubricant, exactly where the drop was meant to hang free.

She worked the cuff loose with her thumbnail and felt the reflector shudder. Across the bay, on the other shutter, the moon waited in her crescent with her profile turned away, her shaded edge pocked like a real surface. Kit had painted that one the year before he took the cold shift on the outer spokes. He had said the moon should keep watch while the sun slept, and she had said he was only being romantic, and he had grinned and said she would miss him when the light went wrong.

The eastern mirror swung up at last, catching the sun's first thin edge and throwing it across the dark floor. Tamsin wiped her hands on her overalls and looked at the moon, lit now along her curve by the same borrowed light, and thought she might as well call him on the comms before the bell rang.