Black and grey tattoo of a sun and crescent moon with carved faces, set in an ornate diamond frame with scrollwork, on a person's upper back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Sun and moon with faces on upper back

Geometric · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A sun and crescent moon, each with a stylised face, sit at the centre of a diamond-shaped ornamental frame with pointed rays, leaves and curling vines. The linework is crisp and dark, with grey shading on the moon and rays and dotted detailing along the moon's edge. The tattoo fills the frame of the photo against a warm skin tone, with the person's back and shoulder blade visible around it.

Geometric Back Sun Moon Face Mandala Scrollwork Leaves Vine Star

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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

The lamp-room at Hollin smelt of paraffin and wet wool, and Dad's lamp hung on its hook with the brass number turned out, the way he liked it. Joe Renwick's boy had come up from the low levels that morning coughing black, and the whole row was talking about it at the bus shelter before the bell had stopped. Dad said nothing. He just tapped his tin of barley sugar twice against his palm, which was what he did instead of praying.

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Mam kept the drawing on the mantel behind the clock. She'd done it on the back of a wages slip the winter I was nine: a sun and a moon, each with a face, sat in the middle of a diamond she'd copied from the iron gates at St Oswald's. Ferns and curls ran off the corners like the bindweed on our yard wall. She said the sun was for Dad going down the shaft and the moon was for him coming up, because a man on nights never sees either one properly and somebody has to keep account of them.

When I was sixteen I took a pen to the diamond and tried to make it mine, adding spikes to the rays and dots along the crescent where Mam had left a clean line. Dad turned it over in his big hands, squinting at it the way he squinted at the pay board. He could not read much, but he knew a drawing done with care. He folded it into his top pocket and said it would do for the next twenty years.

He retired in the spring. The first morning he slept past six, the sun came through the bedroom gap onto the mantel, the moon on the old slip caught the light, and nobody in that house had anywhere they needed to be.