Black and grey tattoo of a crescent moon with mandala detailing and two peony-style flowers with leaves, plus dotted lines and a small heart, on the outer thigh.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Crescent moon with flowers and dotted lines

Botanical · Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

A crescent moon with mandala-style patterning on its inner edge frames a cluster of two large flowers with leaves. Fine dotted lines hang below the flowers, and a small outlined heart sits at the lower left. The work uses black ink with grey shading on the petals and moon, and the design is arranged diagonally across the upper thigh.

Botanical Dotwork Geometric Thigh Moon Crescent Flower Peony Leaf Mandala Dot Heart

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Nell, the rain has not stopped since Tuesday and Mr Okafor has given up pretending the stall roof holds. I am writing this on the back of an invoice because the peonies are sulking under the tarpaulin and I need something to do with my hands. You will laugh, but I have kept the cream ones dry for you. Three buckets of them, heads like crumpled tissue, the kind you said you could never sell in March. Sell them anyway, I said. Nobody buys flowers that look like that unless they are sorry about something.

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The moon man came by at six, the one with the rolled-up drawings under his arm. He wanted the crescent drawn fat, like it was being pulled up out of the river. He kept tapping the corner of his sketch and saying the dots had to fall down like water off a gutter, not in a line, never in a line. I told him the dots looked like the beads my mother used to drop on the kitchen lino when she was counting stitches. He said that was exactly it, and paid me in coins I had to pick off the wet cobbles.

So here is the thing I wanted to tell you. The moon is only half a moon, and I think that is why it works. Half of it is full of little mandalas, circles inside circles like the lace on Gran's good tablecloth, and the other half is just air. I keep thinking the flowers are sitting in the gap where the rest of the moon should be, as if somebody decided to keep them there.

Come Saturday, bring a flask. The buckets are heavy and I have no one to lift them with but you.