Black ink crescent moon tattoo with a dotted mandala pattern and dangling beaded chains, sitting on the ankle.

Crescent moon with mandala and beaded drops

Dotwork · Ankle · Black and grey · Photo

A crescent moon sits on the lower leg near the ankle, its outer edge filled with dotted mandala-style patterns and petal-like motifs. Fine beaded chains with teardrop ends hang from the lower curve and from the inner edge of the crescent. The tattoo is solid black ink with stippled shading, set against plain skin and a purple background.

Dotwork Geometric Ankle Crescent moon Moon Mandala Bead Chain Dot Pattern

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The moon caught in the alders above Thornwick every third winter, and every third winter a child from the village had to climb up and free it. This year the job fell to Ada Penrose, who was nine and had decided she was not afraid of anything except her mother's bread knife and the dark under the church stairs. The wood was black with frost. Her breath went up in small grey clouds, and the lantern swung from her wrist on a loop of string.

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The moon hung by one horn in the crook of the oldest alder, its back rim worked all over with rings and little star-petals, as fine as the lace on her grandmother's collar. Strings of silver beads hung from its lower curve and from the inside edge, each ending in a drop like a pin of ice. When Ada touched it, the beads chimed. Old Tulley the warden had told her the drops were the nights the moon had given away, one for every child it had lit home from the wood. She had thought he was teasing. She did not think so now.

She unhooked it with both hands. It weighed no more than a bowl of milk. Halfway down the path a bead worked loose and dropped into the bracken without a sound, and Ada knelt in the frost until her fingers found it, cold and round. She could not leave it. Somebody would tread on it in the morning and lose their way.

At the green pond she set the moon on the black water, where it floated and shone, its beads trailing beneath it like a fishing line. Ada put the bead in her pocket and walked home. Over the roofs the sky cleared, and the moon climbed out of the pond as if it had never been caught at all. Her palm stayed cold for a long time after that.