Black dotwork flash sheet of ten pairs of crescent arc designs with dot clusters and hanging drops, shown without any body part.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Dotwork arc and drop ornament flash sheet

Dotwork · Black and grey · Flash

The sheet shows ten pairs of crescent-shaped arcs, each with a tiered or hanging ornament made from small solid dots and fine curved lines. The dots are arranged in rows, clusters and drops, and the linework is clean and even on a plain white background. The designs are in solid black ink only, laid out in two staggered rows with a sparse, even spacing.

Dotwork Geometric Arc Crescent Dot Ornament Drop Stencil

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Tom,

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The pattern cards came out of Mum's tin on Tuesday, the ones with the crescents on, and I have been sat at the kitchen table ever since trying to work out which is which. Ten pairs, every one a moon with its shadow hung underneath. She drew them the year you went to sea, when the bead shop on Caroline Street still had a window worth looking into, and she never once told me what they were for.

Mr Adair came round for his order this morning and turned the top card the right way up with one finger. He said the dots looked like rain caught on a tiara. I said they looked like the Pleiades if the Pleiades had been seen to by a dressmaker. He laughed, which he doesn't often, and then he asked whether we could still cut the drops to length by hand, the way she did, and I said we could if I learnt to hold my breath.

So I have been practising. The first pair is easy, a row of dots fanning out from the arc like a bridge taking weight. The fourth is where my hands go wrong, because she has let the dots slip off the line on purpose, so the ornament looks like it is tipping. I have gone over it nine times with the fine nib and it still looks deliberate, which I suppose is the point.

There is one card left blank at the bottom of the tin, just a crescent with nothing hanging from it. I haven't decided whether to fill it or leave it, so I have put it in your drawer with the postcards from Lisbon. Bring the ink home when you're in port, and we'll decide together what drops from the last moon.

Love, Hetty