Black fine-line drawing of a dotwork crescent moon with a swirl motif and an arrow below, placed among citrine and green crystals on a white sheet.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Crescent moon and arrow design

Fine line · Black and grey · Flash

The drawing shows a crescent moon with stippled dotwork shading along its inner curve, enclosing a looped swirl ornament. A diamond shape sits above the moon, and a vertical line with a small arrow hangs from its base. Coloured crystals surround the design, and a tribal-style arrow pattern is partly visible at the lower left.

Fine line Dotwork Crescent moon Arrow Swirl Diamond Crystal Dot

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The moon over Ysmere had been losing its edge for a hundred years, and my mother said the fault lay with the dot-men. They sat on the chalk cliffs above the salt flats with pens of sharpened bone, pricking tiny marks into the sky-maps, and every mark, she said, was a bite the moon could never grow back. I believed her until I was nine and found the tally-book hidden under her loom.

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It was a ledger of crescents. Each month, in faded brown ink, someone had drawn the moon as a thin curve, stippled along its inner edge with hundreds of dots, and beside it a small arrow pointing down toward the river gate. The dots were not bites. They were counts: one for every lamp lit in the eastern towers, one for every boat that had gone out past the reeds and not come back.

I took the book to the Diamond Clerk at the gate, a woman with citrine rings who read every page twice before she spoke. 'The moon is not being eaten,' she said. 'It is being counted, and somebody has to carry the count down the river so the lamps know when to dim.' She gave me a staff feathered with arrow shafts and a satchel of green glass to light my way, and I set off before the frost had finished forming on the gate posts.

I walked eleven nights. On the last, the moon hung thin above the marsh, and at last I understood the loop inside its curve was a knot, the same one the boatmen tie to keep a line from slipping. I lashed the book to the staff, drove it into the mud at the water's edge, and let the dots slide off into the current. The towers dimmed one by one, and for the first time in my life the moon above Ysmere looked like something that had finished being counted.