Black and grey dotwork chest tattoo of a mandala with a winged insect, crescent moons and a sun, centred on the upper chest.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Dotwork mandala and winged insect on chest

Dotwork · Chest · Black and grey · Photo

A symmetrical mandala of fine dots spreads across the upper chest, framing a winged insect with outstretched wings at its centre. Above the insect sits a small sun flanked by two crescent moons, all built from stippled dots and fine linework. The ink is black and grey only, and the composition is centred on the sternum with the shoulders partly visible.

Dotwork Geometric Chest Mandala Insect Crescent moon Sun

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mind the third stair, it gives under a man who's had his supper. Pull that chair nearer the lamp. Not the one with the wet cushion. There. Listen now, the cicadas are still going in the cliff grass and I'll not talk over them.

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Every seventeen summers, Calder Bay got a sun that came up in two halves. Ask any fisherman. The old ones said the cicadas had lived so long under the headland they forgot the colour of daylight, and when they climbed out they carried a sun on their backs like a lantern, with two spare moons to hang either side of it so the bay would know which way was home. Nobody in this house believed it, not until the summer Miss Edith Quarry took the back room with the cracked window and a trunk full of pins.

She said she was a lacemaker's daughter, and she sat at that window every night pricking tiny holes into card with a needle, counting. On the thirteenth night a cicada came to her sill, pale as a bleached bone, its wings stitched out of sea mist. It asked her for nothing. It only wanted the two moons she had lifted from the rock pools as a girl and kept in a salt tin.

So she gave them back. The bay went dark for the length of a slow breath, and the harbour bell rang on its own. By morning the tin was empty and the cicadas had gone quiet in the grass. Her pins are still in that window frame, if you care to look. Count them. There's always one more than you expect.