Solid black blackwork tattoo of a sun-like star motif above a hatched crescent moon, placed on the lower abdomen above a dark waistband.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Sun motif above crescent moon on stomach

Blackwork · Other · Black and grey · Photo

A solid black tattoo shows a sun-like star motif with a radiating, serrated outline and a central four-pointed star, sitting above a crescent moon. The crescent is filled with fine horizontal hatching and small grey shaded areas. The design is black and grey only and is centred in the frame on bare skin above a dark waistband.

Blackwork Other Sun Star Crescent moon Moon

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The tide tables for Inchmurran were painted on the lee wall of the boathouse, and my grandfather had kept them current every spring with a brush and a tin of lamp black. When his hands started shaking, the job came to me, though I had never once been allowed up the ladder without him holding it.

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The trouble was the crescent. Every month the moon pulled the water out past the skerries, and every month the old chart showed the low-water stone where the sea had long since swallowed it. I went out at dawn with a rope and a sounding pole, counting strokes the way he taught me, while the star he had scratched into the lintel above the door kept catching the light as if it were checking my arithmetic.

On the ninth morning the ferryman, Dougie Rae, rowed across to tell me the sun was early, the moon was late, and nobody in Oban would believe either. I told him the wall had been right for eighty years. He laughed, then studied the serrated sun I had sketched in the margin of my ledger and went quiet, because it was the same sun his mother had carved on the bow of her boat.

I painted the moon that evening, hatching it fine with the same nib and shading grey where the shadow fell. At the next low water the stone showed its ring of barnacles exactly where the points of the crescent aimed, and beneath the date I wrote my own initials, not his.