Small black dotwork tattoo of a crescent moon with stippled clouds and a dotted sky on the forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Crescent moon with clouds and dotted sky

Dotwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A small crescent moon sits on the arm, with its lower edge filled by shaded clouds drawn in outline and stipple. The upper area of the circle is made of evenly spaced dots that suggest a night sky. The tattoo is done in black ink only, with the detail concentrated in the clouds and the dotted field, against smooth pale skin.

Dotwork Forearm Moon Crescent moon Cloud Dot Night sky

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Ruth Abney had kept the coconut shy for thirty-one summers, and she knew the moon was not a thing a fair could own. Every October the rides went down on the common outside Ely, and every October the old crescent came up over the cattle sheds, thin as a paring knife, and sat on the Wheel of Fortune as though it had paid for a ticket.

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The year the lad from the dodgems came to her, he had ink on his fingers and nothing in his pockets. He wanted the moon for the big top, he said, so the children would look up from the sawdust. Ruth told him the moon was hard to get and harder to keep. He said he would count the stars instead, and he began pricking holes in a sheet of tin with a nail, one dot after another, row on row, until the sky over the fairground was filled and the dark had something to hold.

On the last night the clouds came in low off the fen and wrapped the crescent like wool round a spindle. The lights went out one by one. Ruth found the lad sitting on the steps of her caravan with the tin across his knees, and when she looked where he was looking, the moon had come down into the little holes and was shining there, lit from underneath by nothing at all.

She took the tin from him and carried it to the Wheel. By morning the real moon had gone down behind the sheds, and the fair was packed into lorries and gone. The tin stayed nailed to the shy's back post, dotted and patient, and the children who came later said the sky over Ely was never quite so dark as it had been that year.