Stippled pen drawing of a crescent moon with a city of domed towers and minarets on its surface, surrounded by small stars, in grey ink on a light grey background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Crescent moon with a domed city

Dotwork · Black and grey · Flash

A crescent moon with cratered, textured surface carries a cluster of domed towers, minarets and arched buildings along its edge. The shading is built from dense stippling and fine hatching in grey-blue ink, with small four-pointed stars scattered across the empty background. The composition is a single centred subject on a plain light grey ground, with the moon curving from upper left to lower right.

Dotwork Moon Crescent City Star

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit down, the lot of you, and mind the bucket, because Mrs Okafor's boy has been sick in it already. You want the story of the moon city? Then listen, because I'll not tell it twice and the tide won't wait.

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Back when my grandfather mended nets on the quay at Sallow Point, there was a dyer called Rafiq who lived above the chandlery, and he had a habit of climbing the harbour wall after dark with a tin of ink and a bundle of pens. He drew the sky. Not the stars as you'd see them, mind, but the bits between, the dark you only notice when you've stopped looking for anything.

One night in the hard frost he came down the wall shaking, and he would not go home. He sat in the fish market with his hands round a cup and said the moon had come down low over the breakwater and there were towers on it. Domes like onions, he said, and little needles of minaret, and streets so narrow a man could touch both walls. Everyone laughed. Then the old harbourmaster went out to look, came back quiet, and bought Rafiq a second cup.

Rafiq drew it every night after that, the crater pits, the arches cut into the rim, the cluster of cupolas nestled on the shadowed edge, and he never once sold a drawing. He said the city had to stay where it was or it would forget how to be a city. When he died they found a hundred sheets of it under his bed, and every one showed the same thing: a crescent with its horns pointing towards the sea, and a single lamp lit in the highest window.

That lamp's still lit, if you know where to look on a clear night. Go on, the next time the moon's thin, hold your hand up to the sky. Mind the bucket.