Black ink flash drawing of a sun with a sleeping face and moon phases above, with dotwork shading and hanging drops, on a sketchbook page.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Sun face with moon phases design

Fine line · Black and grey · Flash

A black ink drawing of a sun with closed eyes and a serene face, surrounded by pointed rays and dotted stippling. Five moon phases in a curved arc sit above and to the side, and a crescent moon rests on a thin line at the top. Below the sun, dotted chains and teardrop shapes hang in a chandelier-like arrangement, all drawn on white paper with a fineliner pen beside it.

Fine line Dotwork Sun Moon Moon phase Crescent moon Face Dotwork Linework Teardrop Chain Sketch

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You have never seen the sun close its eyes, and the kingdom of Oriel Vane has never allowed it. The sun there is kept by the Lamplighters of the Dunmere Tower, who climb each dusk to hang its brass face on the hook of the sky and each dawn to lift it back. The sun is an old man with a sleeping face, and the rays around him are the spokes of a wheel that turns only while someone keeps oiling it. You are the apprentice who holds the oilcan, and you have been told not to look at his face for longer than a breath, because he is said to dream about the moon.

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The moon in Oriel Vane has no fixed house. It wanders the sky in a slow ring, shedding itself one sliver at a time, and the tower keeps a ledger of each shape it takes. Five faces hang above the sun this month: the thin silver nail, the half, the swelling round, and two others the old keepers have stopped naming. Above them all sits the crescent, pinned to a thread the chief keeper calls the spindle. Every night the spindle creaks. Every night the sun leans toward it a little further, and every morning the chain of dotted beads that drapes beneath the wheel has slipped a link lower, as if something is pulling it down.

On the morning the last bead drops free, you climb the tower alone with the oilcan and find the old man awake. He opens one eye, looks past you at the pale crescent still hanging in the blue, and asks whether you have brought the ledger. You have. He tells you to write the new shape in the margin, the one you have never seen before, and when you lift the pen the ink runs from the nib in the exact dotted pattern of his rays. You write it down, and the sun closes his eye again, and the wheel turns.