Black and grey botanical tattoo of a crescent moon and roses with dotwork accents, placed on the chest below the bust.

Crescent moon and roses below the bust

Botanical · Chest · Black and grey · Photo

A crescent moon sits at the centre of a garland of black roses with leaves, and a row of rose blooms extends to each side. Fine dotted lines and small drop shapes hang beneath the flowers, and dots rise above the moon. The linework is clean and the roses are shaded in grey, set against plain skin with a checked shirt at the edges of the frame.

Botanical Dotwork Chest Crescent moon Moon Rose Leaves Dot Drop

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Gather close, because the moon does not wait for latecomers and neither will this tale. There was once a gardener called Ottilie Crane who kept a walled plot behind the chapel at Wrenhollow, and she grew only roses, black ones, which the village thought unlucky. Every evening she carried a watering can along the lowest path, and every evening the moon rose over the wall like a silver sickle someone had dropped in the sky.

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One August the drought came down so hard that the bramble roads cracked and the well at the lych gate sank to a coin's depth. Ottilie went out at midnight with her can and found the roses drooping, their leaves curled like burnt paper. She did not curse the sky. She knelt, tipped the last of the water into the dry bed, and whispered her names for each bush, one by one, the way her mother had taught her. Little dots of wet darkened the soil where the drops fell, and the old crescent of the moon leaned down to see.

In the morning the roses had lifted their heads, every one of them, and a row of new blooms ran out from the centre bed on either side like a garland hung for a wedding. The village still says the moon gave the water back. Ottilie only laughed and said she had simply stopped watering the sky and started watering the ground, and that the moon had been very patient with her about it.