Black line drawing of a crescent moon filled with botanical roses and leaves, drawn on pale paper as a tattoo design.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Crescent moon filled with roses

Botanical · Black and grey · Flash

A crescent moon outline contains clusters of open roses, rose buds and leaves drawn in black ink. The linework is bold and even, with the roses shaded lightly through hatching on the petals. The design is in black and grey on a pale background, with the flowers arranged along the curve of the moon and the inner half left empty.

Botanical Moon Crescent Rose Leaf Flower Floral

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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

Ada had the ink pot balanced on the coal bucket when the lock keeper's dog started barking along the towpath, and she swore, because a drop of Indian ink on the good paper would ruin the whole sheet. Her father's sketchbook lay open across the table of the barge Lark, moored below the weir at Hadley. He had drawn the moon for her years ago, a thin silver crescent pinned to the cabin wall with brass tacks, and she had never liked the empty side of it.

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Every evening for a month she had gone over his lines with roses. First the big open blooms along the lit edge, then the buds, then the leaves that crept inward like damp up a wall. Her hand shook less when the lamp was low. Mr Pryce stopped by with a heel of bread and asked whether she meant to finish the boat's name or the moon, and she said the moon, because the Lark had carried that name since before she was born and nobody was going to repaint it now.

When the rain came sideways off the marsh, she worked on the last cluster near the tip, a rose half open the way her father drew them when he was in a hurry. She hatched the petals with the finest nib, one short stroke after another, until the shading looked like light caught in a cup. Then she turned to the empty half and left it bare, the way it had always been, and looked at it for a long while.

Morning came grey over the weir. Ada tacked the new sheet to the wall beside his, the roses climbing the curve as neatly as if they had always meant to, and the dark side stayed dark. For once it looked like something she had chosen.