Black and grey dotwork tattoo on an upper arm showing a shaded circle with a small moon-like dot, surrounded by ten black crescent symbols arranged in a ring.

Dotwork circle of crescent symbols on upper arm

Dotwork · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A large circular dotwork panel sits at the centre of the upper arm, with a shaded disc containing a small round motif and a curved line. Ten bold black crescent-shaped symbols, each with small marks and dots, encircle the panel in an even ring. The shading is built entirely from stippled dots in black and grey, and the symbols are solid black with crisp edges against the pale skin.

Dotwork Geometric Upper arm Crescent Circle Moon Dot Symbol Ring

Find an artist for this

Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Ostara had counted the crescents for nine years before the priest allowed her to touch the bronze disc. Each new moon the old man Teshub climbed the roof of the granary with a pot of lamp black and a bone stylus, and each new moon he marked one more sign on the ring of stone that ran round the threshing floor. Ten marks in all, and when the tenth was cut the year would turn. Ostara carried his ink. She had learned that a mark pressed too deep would split the stone, and that a crescent drawn in a hurry would lean like a drunk man.

Keep reading

The disc itself was the trouble. Teshub had made it from the grey clay of the river bank, pressing it so many times with his thumb that the surface pocked like a sieve, and in the middle he had left a hollow the size of a child's fist. He said the dark in the hollow was the year waiting to be filled. Ostara thought it looked like a hole where a coin had been prised out, but she did not say so, because the last time she had argued with him he had made her sit the whole of a night facing the wall.

On the ninth mark, a dry wind came off the desert and the river dropped a hand's width in a single afternoon. Teshub went quiet. He sat with his back against the granary wall and let the lamp gutter out. When Ostara asked what she should cut, he held out the stylus and said, "Not mine to say. Look up."

She looked up. The moon was a thin white paring above the threshing floor, and beside it, almost too small to see, a second point of light had come to stand exactly where the hollow lay. She cut the tenth crescent without thinking, and the river rose before dark.