Black ink drawing of a crab with moon phases on its shell, a feather, a flower, shells, an anchor and a CANCER banner, shown as a tattoo flash design.

Zodiac crab with moon phases and banner

Black and grey · Flash

A crab fills the sheet, with eight moon phases set around a radiating sun on its shell. Around it sit a feather, a flower, scallop shells, an anchor and a banner reading CANCER. The linework is fine and detailed, with stippled dotwork and hatching for shading, and the piece is entirely in black ink on white.

Crab Zodiac Moon phase Sun Feather Flower Shell Anchor Banner Lettering

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

Mind the fire, the pair of you, and don't mind the snow at the shutters, it's only the wind wanting a drink. Where was I? The crab. Every tide that winter, old Hannah Mabry walked the shingle below this inn with a lantern she never lit, because the moon was light enough for her, and she was counting the crabs that crept up out of the wrack.

Keep reading

The one she wanted was bigger than the rest, its shell the colour of wet slate, and on its back eight small moons turned slowly, waxing and waning as the real one did above the bay. Some nights the crab's moon was full while the sky held only a sliver. Her brother Tam, who sold salt herring to the carters, swore she'd been at the bottom of the gin cask. He stopped laughing the night the crab tangled in his nets and would not be lifted out without a fight.

That last week of the frost, the moons on its shell went dark one by one, and Hannah followed it out past the breakwater to the rusted anchor where the Margaret Ann had gone down the winter before. The water was black glass and the snow came sideways. She knelt on the cold stone and laid her palm flat on the shell, and the eighth moon lit under her hand like a coal blown on.

The crab walked off into the deep carrying that light to the bottom of the bay, and Hannah walked home with empty hands and a face full of frost. So when you see a lamp moving on the water off Wick, you leave the oars be and you say her name. Now, who's for another cup before the candles go?