Fine line black tattoo of a crescent moon with mandala detail and hanging arrow and chain ornaments on the upper arm.

Crescent moon and arrow ornament on upper arm

Fine line · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A crescent moon filled with mandala-style scrollwork sits on the outer upper arm, with chains, beads and arrow shapes hanging beneath it. The linework is thin, even and dark, in black ink only, with no shading or fill. The tattoo is shown from the side against a plain background, with a grey tank top at the edge of the frame.

Fine line Upper arm Crescent moon Mandala Arrow Chain Bead Ornament

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The wire had gone brittle in the damp, so the lace came apart in your fingers before you had finished the second scallop. You sat on an upturned crate beside the stove with the pillow across your knees and forty bobbins clacking like teeth, and you began again. Mrs Okonedo's pattern was a crescent moon drawn in pencil on card gone soft as cloth, its border a row of small half-circles that curled back on themselves like sleeping cats.

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Beneath the moon she had sketched a fall of chains, a bead at every link, and at the bottom three arrowheads pointing down toward the hem. Her husband had fletched arrows on the far quay and had gone out with the herring fleet one March and not come back in. She said the arrows were for the boats that did come home, so they could find the harbour wall in the dark. You had not asked her which way they were meant to point, and she had not told you.

On the ninth night the thread ran out with one arrowhead still unworked. You tied off with a double knot and walked down to the quay with the lace folded inside your coat. The tide was out and the moon lay in the wet sand as a thin bright curve. You stood at the rail until your hands stopped shaking, then laid the lace open on the cold stone and weighted its corners with four mussel shells.

In the morning the wind had turned the arrowheads to face the town. Mrs Okonedo came down the steps in her slippers, looked at the pattern for a long time, and said that one arrow was missing, and that it was all right, because somebody would always be coming back to finish it.