Black ink drawing of a dotwork sun and crescent moon with an open eye, three roses and arrows radiating from the centre, shown as a tattoo design on paper.

Sun, moon, eye and roses design

Dotwork · Black and grey · Flash

A black ink drawing of a sun and crescent moon, each with a face, sitting within a circle of sunburst rays. A single eye is drawn in the sun, and three roses and several arrows, one with a hatched head, radiate outwards from a central point. The linework is fine and clean, with stippled dotwork shading on the sun, moon and roses, and the design is drawn on a pale sheet of paper.

Dotwork Geometric Sun Moon Eye Rose Arrow Ray

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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

Uncle Desmond had the wheel of the old Bedford and I had the map across my knees, a sheet so folded that the lake on it had worn through to paper. We were carrying cut roses in tin buckets to a nursery in Alice Springs, which he called the daftest load ever to cross the Kettle Road, and every bucket slid whenever the track dropped into a washout. Both the sun and the moon hung over the ridges that afternoon, the moon pale as a dinner plate and the sun still hot enough to blister the dash.

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Near Wirrin bore we found the surveyor's arrows. Someone had driven a row of steel pins into the gibber, each with a hatched head so you could read it from the cab, and every one pointed the same way, toward a notch in the hills I had never seen on any chart. Desmond had been a chainman for the Works Department before his knees went. He crouched by the nearest pin, ran his thumb over the hatching, and said a surveyor only sets arrows when he means to come back.

We followed them until the light went long and gold. The sun slid behind the ridge at the same moment the moon climbed over the other shoulder, and for a minute they sat either side of the notch like two faces leaning in to share a secret. Desmond took off his hat. Roses lay in the buckets behind us, drooping in the heat, and the wind carried their sweetness into the cab.

At the notch there was only a cairn with a tin plate nailed to it, stamped with a single open eye and a date from before either of us was born. Desmond laughed until he had to hold the tailgate. We turned the Bedford around and drove the roses back to town, and the nursery man never did learn why his order arrived a day late and smelling of gibber dust.