Two watercolour-style tattoos on a pair of forearms: a blue and purple moon with a face on the left arm and an orange and red sun with a face on the right, both with black linework.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Sun and moon watercolour forearm pair

Forearm · Colour · Photo

Two tattoos of stylised faces sit on separate forearms, a crescent moon on the left and a radiating sun on the right, each with black linework outlining the features and rays. The moon is filled with blue, teal and purple washes, while the sun is filled with orange and red, and both have paint-like drips running downward and loose splashes of colour around them. The photo is taken straight on against a pale, textured background, with the two arms placed side by side.

Forearm Sun Moon Face Splash Drip

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nobody in Haddow Keep had ever seen the two sisters meet, because the keep had no roof to meet under. The sun sister, Oriel, climbed the east stair each morning with a pot of ochre and a goose quill, and by the time she reached the top she had painted her face gold and rayed it out with a fine black line, so the carters on the valley road could set their clocks by her. Her sister Sela kept the west stair. She worked in indigo and river clay, and when the bells of the drowned village rang across the water she came up with her hair loose and her cheeks silver.

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For forty years they passed each other on the gatehouse bridge and said nothing but "mind the drip." Oriel's paint ran in the rain and left red streaks down the curtain wall, so the shepherds called the keep the Bleeding Stone. Sela's ran blue down the chapel and into the moat, and the perch came up with blue gills. Neither would scrub the walls. Scrubbing would have meant admitting the other had been there at all.

One winter the moat froze hard enough to walk on, and Sela crossed it at dusk to find her sister sitting on the step, her gold gone grey with cold. Sela said nothing. She knelt, stirred a little of her own indigo into the ochre pot, and painted a thin blue rim around Oriel's rays, so that in the last light the sun had a moon's edge. Oriel laughed, and the sound cracked the ice.

Now the carters see two faces over Haddow at evening, one on each tower, and the walls below run red and blue together into the moat, where the perch have gone the colour of dusk.