Black and grey dotwork moon tattoo with mandala patterns, stars and leaves, placed on the side of the ribs.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Moon and mandala tattoo on the ribs

Dotwork · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A circular tattoo shows a crescent moon with a stippled dotwork shadow, stars and a mandala-style border of leaves and ornamental motifs. The linework is fine and black, with shading built from dots on the moon's shadowed edge. The tattoo sits on the side of the ribcage, with a red lace garment in the foreground and a blurred background.

Dotwork Geometric Ribs Moon Star Mandala Leaves Circle

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You have the oven door open before the shipping forecast finishes, and the kitchen smells of scorched sugar and yeast. Through the back window the moon hangs low over the bins, only a sliver of its shadowed side showing, the rest lit like a plate someone forgot to dry. Mrs Okafor's sourdough is already proving in its baskets, dusted with rice flour, and you check the wall clock because it is the only thing in here that never argues with you.

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Ferdinand, who started on Monday, asks why you score the loaves in a pattern nobody will see once they're sliced. You tell him the customers see it at the counter, that the crust is the first thing they look at. He says it looks like a mandala, a word he picked up from his sister's colouring books. You let that go. Scoring is drawing done in a hurry with a blade instead of a pen, and you have never found a good reason to do it carelessly.

At ten to five the stars go out one by one above the car park, and the sky turns the colour of cold tea. You lift the first tray with the peel and slide it into the rack. Each loaf is ringed with leaves of golden crust, opened where the steam wants to escape, and the lamp above the bench catches the shine on them. Ferdinand whistles something off-key. You look up and find the moon has slipped behind the flats opposite, and nobody has noticed but you.

"Another hour and it'll be daylight," you say, and he admits he has never once been awake for a sunrise on purpose. You take the last loaf from the oven, tap its base with two knuckles, and it sounds hollow and right, the way a good night's work should.