Colour traditional tattoo of a smiling crescent moon with a blushed cheek, surrounded by red, pink and white flowers and a teardrop, on an arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Traditional crescent moon with flowers on a forearm

Traditional · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A crescent moon with a human face in profile sits at the centre of the design, shaded in blue-grey with a red blush on the cheek. Pink, red and white flowers with green leaves frame the moon on the left, and a grey teardrop shape sits below it on the right. Bold black outlines define the forms, and the same tattoo is shown in two side-by-side photographs, one closer and one further away.

Traditional Forearm Moon Crescent moon Face Flower Leaves Teardrop

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The moon had taken to leaning over the garden wall at Hollin Cottage, her cheek pressed to the cold brick, because from there she could see Mrs Abney's pinks coming up in the bed beside the rain butt. Mrs Abney was eighty-one and had planted them the spring her husband went to sea and never came back up the Humber. Every dawn the moon counted them, and every dawn there were fewer, and the drops she shed over the loss fell silver onto the path and rolled into the grit.

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On the ninth night she caught the thief. He was Tomas, Mrs Abney's grandson, home from the fish market in Grimsby, crouched with a penknife and a paper bag. "They're for Kerry from the chippy," he said before she could ask, the way boys do when they know they're guilty. "She likes pink." The moon's face went thin and cold. "Pinks don't open for anyone who robs them," she said, though she could not quite remember whether that was true. Tomas looked at the bed, then at the lamp in the kitchen window, and said nothing for a long while.

He came back the next morning with a trowel and a sack of bonemeal, and he knelt in the bed until his knees were black. Each night after that he swept her drops off the path before the milkman came, and each night she gave him a little more light to work by. By August the bed was thick with buds, and nobody could say which ones had been stolen.

Mrs Abney found a single pink in a jam jar on the step, with a grey pebble beside it, smooth as a sea-worn tooth. She kept the pebble in her apron pocket for the rest of her life, and sometimes, when she stood at the wall after dark, she would swear the moon nodded to her.