Black ink drawing of a crescent moon filled with mandala-style patterns, dotwork, zigzags and swirls, shown as a tattoo design on cream paper.

Crescent moon mandala design

Dotwork · Black and grey · Flash

A crescent moon is drawn in black ink within a circular border, with the crescent itself filled with dense ornamental patterns of petals, scallops and spirals. The linework is fine and precise, with areas of stippled dotwork and zigzag bands that create texture and rhythm. The design is entirely black on a plain cream background, with the motif centred and filling the frame.

Dotwork Geometric Moon Crescent Mandala Ornament Dot Swirl Zigzag Petal

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

The carter's boy had walked since sundown with a jar of goat milk and no sense of direction, and when the moon rose thin over the ridge he cursed it for a sliver, no use to a man on a road with no edges.

Keep reading

The woman at Sable Cross had heard that cursing before. She filled his cup from a stone jug and told him the moon had not always been so bare. Long ago a scribe named Maren Doyle sat on the ridge each night with a pen of soot and spring water, inking petals and scallops into the moon's pale face so the light would have something to hold. She drew zigzags like a dry riverbed and rows of dots like wells seen from above, and by the end of her life the moon was so ornamented that it gave off more pattern than glow.

The boy asked what the moon had given back for all that lace. The woman said it had asked for nothing, only that the dark rim be left to carry the drawing, and that the bright half be let go. Maren gave the moon her last pen and walked down to the road without a lamp. Nobody ever saw her again, but the travellers say the moon's two horns point straight down the track toward the well, and every dot along its edge burns like a lamp someone forgot to put out.

The boy drank the milk, thanked the woman, and looked up. The horns pointed true. He set off toward them, and the road, which had seemed to have no edges, came up in pale stones under his boots.