Black and grey line drawing of a vertical tattoo design with a sun, two crescent moons and an arrow, in a fine line and dotwork style.

Sun, crescent moons and arrow design

Fine line · Black and grey · Flash

A vertical design on a plain white background shows a sun with a spiral centre at the top, two crescent moons stacked below it, and an arrow running through the centre. The crescent moons are filled with mandala-like lace patterns and fine dotted shading, while the sun has radiating rays and small curled motifs. Thin geometric lines form triangles and a diamond between the moons, all in black ink with no colour.

Fine line Dotwork Geometric Sun Moon Crescent moon Arrow Mandala Triangle Diamond

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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

Sit nearer, the both of you, and mind the gutter, it has been running since the rain. No, that's the drunk version you've heard from the lads at the Corn Exchange. This is the true one, and my grandmother had it from a woman who sold pies outside the gasworks.

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There was a girl called Nell Ashdown who kept the lamps on Crescent Row, a proper street in those days, its houses bent round in a half-moon like a bow. Every dusk she climbed the iron ladder with her taper and her tin of oil, and every dawn she came down blackened to the elbows. The sun up there was a brass thing the factory men had painted, all spokes and curls, hanging over the chimneys so bright you couldn't look at it without weeping. Nell said it was the only thing in the city that never asked her for anything.

Then one November the moon went wrong. It came up thin and lopsided, two crescents stacked like a pair of old boots, and the cats wouldn't go out. Nell took her father's bow from the coal shed, the one he used for hares before there were no hares left, and she loosed a single arrow straight up the length of the Row, past the lamp and past the sun, to see where it would come down. It fell through the lace of the moons and stuck in the cobbles by the cellar grate, quivering, and every lamp on the street went out at once.

In the dark, with nothing to climb, she found the arrow still warm. She pulled it free and carried it home under her coat, and in the morning the sun was burning again and the moons had settled into their proper shape. Nobody ever said who had lit them. Nell kept the arrow over her hearth, and the factory men still tell the story wrong, so trim your wicks tonight and mind the ladder on your way home.