If you’re a yin personality with a wish for a meaningful tattoo, explore the fluid pairing of a water and moon illustration. Water-moon tattoo designs are stylish body ink, from line drawings to full-blown Technicolor paintings.
Additional Design Ideas
Water moon designs can communicate several different feelings, depending on the model.
Moon Made of Water
A moon made of water is a trendy choice — curling, splashing waves curve around to create a crescent moon. The curve mirrors the circulation in the body that gives people life, as well as the flowing cycle of birth, death, and rebirth at the heart of many spiritual traditions. The easily identified image is compact enough for an isolated area such as the back of a shoulder or the top of the foot. A crescent moon made out of waves works in all-black lines or a full color, typically heavy on the blue. Try one encircling your navel, maybe with a hint of the moon’s “face” in profile to define the subject.
Moon Over Water
Moons represent dramatic and romantic images as the centerpiece of a full back or inner arm tattoo. The design with a stormy night with a full moon shining over the tossing waves of the ocean hints at turbulent depths represents an unsettled tattoo that pulls you into its spectacle.
Another design may include perigee moon, the orbit that brings a full moon closest to earth, coincides with gales, hurricanes, earthquakes, and other disruptions that shake things up before they settle back into a new pattern. However, a bright moon in a clear sky creates a different path over a calm sea or lake, a tranquil image that highlights the serenity of a moonlit night.
In the Tao, water equates to wisdom. A full moon represents an archetypal symbol for clarity. A peaceful moon over water signals the deeper level of understanding that lies beneath a luminous surface. Scenes take space, so reserve some real estate on your chest, your side over the rib cage or your hip, or the width of your lower back.
Japanese Moon Scenes
Hokusai-style tattoo art, interpreted by skilled tattoo illustrators, can include a moon, for instance, a beautifully red-tinged blood moon with immense rearing waves capped in white foam.
Such a panorama represents investment ink that takes hours to complete over several sessions and could be the focal point of a significant collection of body ink, or in other words, a gallery on your skin.
Wet and Wild Symbolism
Water’s symbolism, combined with the moon, creates a powerfully evocative tattoo. It is common knowledge that water is considered as a symbol of renewal, cleansing and purification, transformation and metamorphosis, mystery, the source of life, and a force that could bring about destruction. Moreover, water is considered to be sacred, like the heavenly bodies that transfixed ancient peoples. A tattooed ocean embellished with a new moon or a partial eclipse of the moon, and a breaching leviathan, might be viewed as magnificent or malevolent, but always as an impressive image.
Sensual Symbol
The moon influences the tides, and women’s reproductive systems are associated with moon cycles. Both the moon and water are thought to be feminine symbols, and that is one reason why water-moon tattoos are favorites of women. The moon itself is seen as a divine presence, a form of the Egyptian goddess Isis, a metaphor for heaven, a center of worship in ancient cultures. In Greece, Artemis, the huntress who rules the tides, is connected with Selene, the moon goddess. In ancient Rome, she was known as Diana. The Celts, Hindus, and Chinese all venerated a moon deity.
Bright Spirit
If you’re in love with the intimate grace of the moon and water, your water-moon tattoo may carry a deep spiritual meaning for you. Kuan-Yin, the Chinese bodhisattva of compassion, is depicted in a famous 12th-century Chinese statue called the “Water and Moon Kuan-Yin Bodhisattva.” The qualities of “water” and “moon” are significant in Kuan-Yin veneration because they stand for dreams, intuition, soul-knowledge, and the truth behind illusion.
A Water Moon Kuan-Yin is a rich subject for a full-back, with the bodhisattva seated on a lotus leaf floating on splashing waves, a full moon illuminating her head from behind like a halo. A Kuan-Yin sitting in the curve of a crescent moon suspended over water is a vertical image to cover an upper arm or a calf.
Double Yin
A water scene that is lit by the moon hints at mystical and secret depths. A moon-shaped from the water represents an all rushing energy and fluidity. A goddess floating in a sea of moonlight portrays selflessness and spiritual aspiration. And a barrel wave-crescent moon on a sharp peck or a tanned pelvic bone might just clue the world to your overwhelming love of surfing, its thrills, and its mysteries. No matter how you choose to ink the moon and water on your skin, consider the coupling an affirmation of feminine energy, wisdom, mercy, and your natural exuberance for life.
