Black ink drawing of a crescent moon filled with mandala patterns and a central butterfly motif, with stippled dotwork edges, as a tattoo design.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Crescent moon mandala with butterfly

Dotwork · Black and grey · Flash

A crescent moon outline is filled with ornate mandala-style patterns of scrolls, petals and paisley shapes. At its centre sits a stylised butterfly or lotus-like motif with pointed wings and small dots along the body. The fine black linework and stippled dot shading are drawn on plain white paper, with the design filling the frame.

Dotwork Geometric Moon Crescent Mandala Butterfly Lotus Paisley Scroll

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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

Ruth Calloway had counted the nights since Madeira, and the moon had thinned to a paring, the kind her father used to call a bent sixpence. The brig Patience lay low under a sky with no stars at all, and the second mate had stopped whistling after the cook fell down the forecastle hatch. Mostly Ruth kept the reckoning book and the lamp trimmed.

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The butterfly came aboard in a crate of Seville oranges, folded against a slat, pale as a wet page. Nobody wanted it. The men held that a creature which flew with no land in sight was a bad omen. Ruth fed it sugar water off the tip of her pencil, and one morning it opened its wings on the chart of the Western Approaches, right over the square where she had marked their position in red ink.

On the third night the wind dropped and the sea went flat as slate. The moon hung low in the west, a crescent so fine it seemed drawn with a nib. Ruth climbed to the foretop with the butterfly settled on her sleeve. From there she could see the wake spreading in rings, each edged with a little lace of phosphorescence where the dolphins turned beneath the hull, scrolling out and fading as if someone were embroidering the dark.

Captain Orme came up with his glass and asked what she was doing. She said she was taking a sight of the moon's horns, which was true enough. He squinted at her, then at the butterfly, and said the thing had got the course right where his instruments had not. She let it go, and it flew west toward a bank of cloud she had not believed was land. By dawn the cloud had become cliffs, and the men were calling her name from the rigging.