Black and grey tattoo on the inner forearm showing a globe on a stand, a moth at the wrist and a geometric mandala border, shown in two photos.

Globe, moth and mandala on a forearm

Geometric · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A black and grey tattoo covers the forearm, centred on a globe on a stand with a mandala-style geometric border above it. A moth sits near the wrist, with stars and a crescent moon filling the gaps around the globe. The linework is fine and even with stippled shading, and the two side-by-side photographs show the design against a graffitied brick wall.

Geometric Dotwork Forearm Globe Moth Mandala Star Crescent moon

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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

You are the only one left in Corvane who still knows how to stipple a coast. The Chart Office has gone to the moths, the old clerk says, and you laugh, because the moths are the only things in the Office that have ever been accurate. Every night they gather at the lamp above your drawing board, grey-winged and patient, and every morning there is a little less ink on the vellum where their dust has settled.

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The globe on your stand is the kingdom of Sorrel Hallow in miniature, its seas pricked out in dots so fine the Queen's surveyors need a glass to read them. The first cartographer built it to hold the stars in place. She pinned each one with a silver point and ringed the sky with cut paper triangles so that nobody would wander past the edge. Nobody has ever said what lies past the edge. The old maps simply stop, with a small careful hand writing *here be quiet*.

On the night the crescent moon slipped from its hook, you followed the moth down the stairs and out past the harbour wall. It flew low over the salt flats, dusting the ground with what it had gathered from the borders, and where the dust fell the grass grew in straight lines like pencil strokes. You understood then that the globe was never a map of the land. It was a cage, and the moth had been carrying the edges out one flake at a time. You went back, lifted the silver points from the sky, and let the stars drop into the sea. By morning the ring of triangles had a gap in it the width of a wing, and beyond it, for the first time in Corvane, there was ink.