Colour traditional tattoo of a crescent moon with a face and red and orange flowers, with a red and orange star beside it, on the shoulder or upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Traditional crescent moon with face and flowers

Traditional · Shoulder · Colour · Photo

A crescent moon with a stylised face in profile sits on the skin, its interior filled with red, orange and teal flowers on a purple ground. A red and orange four-pointed star sits in the open curve of the moon, and green leaves and part of a banner appear at the top left. Bold black outlines define the shapes, with flat, saturated colour fills and no visible shading.

Traditional Shoulder Moon Crescent moon Face Star Flower Leaves Banner

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Now then, sit down on the sawdust and mind the lamp, because this is the bit about the painted moon on the hook-a-duck booth, and I'll not tell it twice. Old Ezra Pell painted every board on the Michaelmas fair for forty years, and he could make a flower look like it was breathing. The moon was his favourite. Purple as a bruised plum, orange edging like a lamplit window, and a face in profile looking off to the left, as if it had heard its name called from the far end of the field.

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Every winter the star fell off the board. Ezra would find it in the sawdust by the big wheel, a little red thing with its points bent like it had been trodden on. He glued it back, he nailed it, once he stitched it on with fishing line. Come spring it was gone again. The girl on the coconut shy said the moon was lonely and wanted a companion, and Ezra laughed at her, until the November he came back to the van and found his brushes laid out in a neat row and the star sitting in the middle of his palette, wet with paint he hadn't mixed yet.

So he stopped fighting it. He set the star in the open curve of the moon, orange at its heart and red at its tips, and gave the moon a teal leaf to hold like a fan. When the fair opened in April the board hung above the hook-a-duck and nothing fell from it all summer, not a flake, not a point.

On the last night, when the lamps were going dark along the midway, a boy swore the moon had winked at him. Ezra looked up. The face was still turned to the left, but the mouth had changed, and a small red star had come loose from the curve and was drifting over the dodgems towards the open field, bright as a struck match. Ezra never painted another moon. The board's still there, if you know where to look, and the star has never once been found in the sawdust since.