A micro-crack in silicon was experimentally investigated by using a combination of transmission electron microscopy and geometric phase analysis. The strain fields of the crack tip, with scales of a few tens of nanometers, were mapped. The crack tip dislocation emission and stress relief by dislocation generation around a crack tip can be proved. And, the strain field of an edge dislocation was compared with the Peierls–Nabarro dislocation model at the scale of a dislocation width. We show that the Peierls–Nabarro model is the appropriate theoretical model to describe the deformation fields of the dislocation core.