Black and grey dotwork tattoo of a crescent moon, a moth and a rose with leaves, running from the shoulder down the upper arm of a woman with pink hair.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Crescent moon, moth and rose on upper arm

Dotwork · Shoulder · Black and grey · Photo

A woman with pink hair is shown in profile, with her face cropped out of the frame. A black and grey tattoo runs from the top of the shoulder down the upper arm, showing a crescent moon above a moth with stippled wing shading, and a rose with leaves below it. The shading is built from fine dots and short strokes, set against plain pale skin and a white lace top.

Dotwork Botanical Shoulder Upper arm Crescent moon Moth Rose Leaves

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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

Edie Carrow had been counting moths against the lamp glass since the spring gales, and the tally never came out even. Every dawn she swept them off the lantern room sill with a goose feather and wrote the figures in the logbook beside the tide times, the way her father had. Most were the grey ones that came up from the potato rows. This morning there was a larger one, its wings dusted with two pale eyes, lying on its back on the cold iron.

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She carried it down the spiral stair in her cupped palms, past the oil store and the bell weights, and out onto the headland where a wild rose had grown through the wall of the old chapel. The bush had flowered pale for a month and was now dropping its petals onto the thrift. Nobody on Scarra had planted it. Her mother had said it came with the first keeper's wife, who had buried a child under the chapel step and asked for something to bloom over her.

Edie set the moth on a rose leaf and waited. The sea below was the colour of pewter, and beyond it the moon hung thin and pared, a crescent sitting low over the water. Ten minutes later the moth lifted, circled the bush once, and went out toward the moon as if it had an appointment.

She wrote the figure in the book, crossed it out, and wrote nothing at all.