Black ink drawing of a yin-yang circle, with a stippled starry night sky and a city skyline on one half and a sun on the other.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Yin-yang with night sky, city and sun

Dotwork · Black and grey · Flash

A pen drawing of a yin-yang circle. The left half is filled with dense dots and stars, with a crescent moon and a city skyline along the central dividing curve. The right half is left open, with a sun drawn in fine radiating lines below the skyline.

Dotwork Yin yang Night sky Star Moon City skyline Sun

Find an artist for this

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

Every dusk at the seventh bell, the lamplighter of Harrowmere climbed the clock tower and swapped the sun for the moon, the way his father had and his grandfather before him. The town slept on the dark side of the square and woke on the bright, and nobody thought it strange until Tomas Greaves found the moon's brass key missing from its hook and the sun still glaring from its dish at midnight.

Keep reading

He climbed the tower with a lantern and found pigeon feathers, a tin of boiled sweets and a drift of cold ash. Then he found footprints in the dust leading out onto the roof. A woman sat on the parapet with her boots off and her hair full of tiny lights, looking down at the town as if she meant to memorise the crooked chimneys and the wet cobbles. Behind her the night lay thick and speckled, and the moon hung in it like a coin someone had forgotten to spend.

"You've been keeping my moon," Tomas said.

"I've been keeping the sun off your bread," she said. "Have you ever once tasted it at noon? It scorches everything it touches. Nobody in this town has ever thanked the dark for anything."

He thought about his father's hands on the brass, the burns he never mentioned. In the end he sat beside her and they traded the key back and forth until the stars were pale. At first light the sun rose over the square, and when the bells rang for dusk, Tomas went up the tower with the moon in his coat, and the woman was waiting at the bottom of the stairs to walk the dark half of the town home with him.