Two black and grey dotwork tattoos: a crescent moon with a drawn face and hanging chains on the upper arm, and a draped chain pattern across the shoulder.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Crescent moon and dotwork chains on arm and shoulder

Dotwork · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

The left photo shows a crescent moon with a carved face in its curve, a small moon on a hanging chain, and a row of dangling chain and drop motifs below, all built from fine dots and thin lines. The right photo shows a shoulder covered in a draped scalloped pattern of beaded chains with small drops hanging from each curve, rendered in fine stippled linework. Both are in black ink and grey tones on plain skin, with a soft, neutral background and the tattoos clearly visible.

Dotwork Fine line Upper arm Shoulder Moon Crescent moon Face Chain Drop Pattern Scallop Star

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mrs Tennant kept the boarding house at the top of Gull Steps, and the moon that winter had a face that nobody in Ebbcombe liked to look at for long. Every night the lodgers drew their curtains against it, and every night Mrs Tennant drew them back, because her husband had gone out on the Pilchard Mary in October and the sea had given back only his cap.

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The moon, the old women said, had been a sailmaker's widow once, who wept so long over her lost men that the sky took her face into its keeping and hung her by the chin from the nails of the heavens. Her tears became the beads that dripped from her hem. Mrs Tennant did not believe a word of it, but she counted the beads anyway, every night, from the attic window, the way her husband had counted his knots.

One night in February the beads stopped at eleven. Mrs Tennant climbed the stairs with a lamp and found the attic empty except for a drop of silver on the sill, cold as a coin. She carried it down to the harbour in her apron pocket and dropped it into the black water off the slip. The tide turned. Out past the breakwater a small light rose and hung from the crescent like a lantern on a chain.

Mrs Tennant put the kettle on and let the curtains be.