Black and grey dotwork tattoo of a crescent moon with a smiling face and a black cat sitting on it, with small stars, on a torso.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Crescent moon and black cat on torso

Dotwork · Other · Black and grey · Photo

A crescent moon with a carved-style face sits on the left, with a black cat perched on its lower curve to the right. Small dotted stars and a row of hanging dots fill the space around them. The moon is shaded with stippled dots and fine radiating lines, while the cat is solid black with fine white highlight lines, and the piece is entirely black ink on pale skin.

Dotwork Other Moon Crescent moon Cat Black cat Star Face

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

Dear Ottilie,

Keep reading

The moon has come back with her face on again, the old one with the pinched mouth, and Mr Halloran has pinned her above the printing press so the whole street can see her from the door. I told him the ink would smudge on damp nights. He told me that was the point of a moon. You know how he talks when the almanac is late.

The cat has taken to her as if she were a windowsill. Every evening Pilar carries the black tom up the stairs in her apron and sets him on the curve of the paper crescent, where he sits with his tail wrapped round his feet and watches the lamplighters walk home. Halloran swears the cat was in the woodcut from the start. I swear he was not. Nothing in this shop is so tidy that it would have a cat in it unbidden.

Last night the stars were out in their dotted rings, and I counted seven before the lamp guttered. The cat stretched and looked straight at me, the way he does when he has decided something. Then he padded off the edge of the moon and dropped into the dark of the stairwell, and Halloran, who never looks up from his type, stopped his hands mid-line and said, quite gently, that he had always wanted to see that happen.

I have not told him the cat came back this morning, sitting in the same place on the page, with ink still wet on his whiskers. Write soon. Tell me whether they have hung your moon yet over the harbour, and whether the gulls have stopped bothering her face.

Yours in haste, Constance