Black and grey dotwork crescent moon tattoo on the side of a person's neck, shown in a black and white photograph.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Crescent moon on the neck

Dotwork · Neck · Black and grey · Photo

A crescent moon is tattooed on the side of the neck, just below the hairline, with the figure's face not visible. The moon is built from dense stippled dotwork shading on its left edge that softens toward the inner curve, with a thin solid outline defining the shape. The image is monochrome, with the dark background and soft lighting drawing focus to the skin and the curve of the neck and shoulder.

Dotwork Neck Moon Crescent moon

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The moonflowers in the walled garden at Harrow Lodge only opened once the lamps were out, and Mrs Ashdown wanted every bloom logged before the first birds started up. Nell carried the lantern and the ledger down the gravel at half eleven, her boots loud on the stones, and counted the white trumpets as they unfurled along the south wall like someone slowly turning on a row of small lights.

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The ledger was older than Nell and older than Mrs Ashdown's marriage. Its margins were full of crescent moons drawn in pencil, each one shaded along its left edge with tiny dots, pressed so close together they made a grey that looked almost like breath on glass. Edmund Ashdown had drawn them all. Nell had asked once why he bothered with the shading, and Mrs Ashdown had said that he believed the dark part of the moon was the part you had to imagine, and that a careful man ought to show it anyway.

On the last page she found an entry in a hand she did not recognise, dated the autumn before the war. Cut the bloom at the crescent, not the full, it said, and under it a small sketch of a moon with its unlit side stippled to nothing. Nell read it twice, then went to the wall, where the flowers were at their most open, and waited until the thinnest sliver of moon stood above the glasshouse roof. She cut the stem just there.

When the sky greyed, she wrote her own line beside the old drawings, a crescent no bigger than a thumbnail, and she shaded its left side dot by dot until the paper went soft and dark under the nib.