Black ink drawing of a mandala with lotus-style petals framing a crescent moon with hanging bead strands, shown on white paper.

Mandala with crescent moon and hanging beads

Black and grey · Flash

A circular mandala drawn in black ink on white paper, with a scalloped outer ring of lotus-like petals filled with fine hatching and small dot motifs. Inside the ring, a crescent moon is outlined in white against a densely patterned dark background, with dotted lines and petal shapes. Several strands of beads with teardrop ends hang down from the top of the moon, and the design is centred and symmetrical.

Mandala Crescent moon Lotus Petal Bead Dot

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The tide is already turning when you reach the slipway, and the mended net is still over your arm where Mrs Hale left it. She wants it back on the boat before the moon clears the breakwater, so you walk fast along the quay, past the chandler's with its shutters down and the gulls working the bins.

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Her husband's boat, the Lantern, has been rotting at its mooring since March. The moon hangs above the chapel roof, a thin white paring, and beneath it the water is black and busy with reflections. You have strung her beads for the float lines all winter: small glass drops, blue and bone, knotted at every hand's width so the lines never tangle. The shed still smells of tar and linseed.

At the end of the pier a stranger sits on a bollard, sketching in a book on his knee. He does not look up. He draws circles inside circles, petals inside the circles, dots at the edges like a clock face, and then he turns the page so you can see the moon he has pinned in the middle, with beads hanging from its horn. "Tide says you can wait," he says. "It says a lot of things here."

You hand over the net. He takes the pen from behind his ear and adds one more drop to the last string, and the whole page goes quiet, the way a harbour does just before the boats come in. You do not ask who he is. You only notice that the moon on his page is the one you can see now, and that the beads are still swinging.