Black and grey dotwork tattoo of a full moon within a thin black outline, on the upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Dotwork full moon on upper arm

Dotwork · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A full moon sits inside a thin black circular outline, with its surface built from stippled dots of varying density to suggest craters and maria. The shading is heaviest on the right side and fades to bare skin on the left, giving a sense of light falling across the disc. The image is entirely black and grey against pale skin, with a plain grey background.

Dotwork Upper arm Moon Full moon Crater

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Ada Pennock had been pricking the same moon for eleven days, and her thumb had gone numb at the joint. The copper plate lay on the slope of her drawing board under two lamps, and beyond the window the Leith roofs were black against a sky the colour of wet slate. She worked the stylus in small, patient strikes, one dot at a time, because Mr Garrow would not allow a single line on a lunar plate. Lines, he said, were for the sun, which had edges enough.

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Her task was the maria, the dark seas, which she built by crowding dots until the copper went grey and soft. Craters came next, each a ring of tight points around a bare pale centre left for the light. The right-hand edge had to be heavy, because the almanac would print it lit from the east, and the left had to fade to nothing, the way the moon looks when the sun has gone behind the hill.

On the eleventh night a boy came up the stairs with a lamp and word that the almanac had been pulled forward a month. Ada did not stop. She finished a crater the size of a pea near the shadowed rim, then sat back and studied the plate through her spectacles. Someone in London would hold this print up to a window and believe in a moon they had never seen from this side of the water. She found she liked that. The dots were only dots until the light got into them.

She signed the corner in the smallest hand she had, A.P., and blew the copper clean. Over the Firth the real moon had risen, full and white, and she did not look at it for long, having nothing left to check it against.