Black and grey dotwork tattoo of a moon with crater detail, placed on the outer forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Moon tattoo on a forearm

Dotwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A small, round moon sits on the forearm, shaded in black and grey with a stippled dotwork technique. Darker dots cluster to form craters on the left side, and the right edge fades into the pale skin. The plain, light background and dark clothing at the left keep the focus on the tattoo.

Dotwork Forearm Moon Crater Celestial

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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

Sit closer, the lamp is failing and I won't shout over the wind coming off the Wash. You want to know about the moon on the ticket booth? Everyone in Lincolnshire knew that painted moon. Old Mr Sallow had it done the summer the show went bust, grey dots for the craters, because he reckoned the big top would still be lit at night even when the crowd had stopped coming.

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Mabel Quirk did the midnight act. She walked a wire forty feet up with no net, because the net had been sold to a scrapyard in Boston for forty pounds. Every night before she stepped out she counted the dots on that painted moon, one to nine, and she said the craters were the places where the sky had taken a bite out of it. Nobody paid her much. The town had stopped looking up for anything that didn't glow on a screen.

The last night, the generator choked at eight and every bulb went dark. Mabel climbed anyway. Mr Sallow stood below with a torch held in both hands, shaking so the beam slid across the canvas, and the moon on the booth caught the light and gleamed, faded at its far edge where the paint had run out. She walked the wire by the light of that one painted thing, and when she reached the platform she laughed, and the children cheered in the dark.

They never found the net. They never found Mabel either, not in any town I've played since. But if you go to that scrapyard in Boston and ask for the ticket booth, you'll see the moon still there, its dark craters lit by nothing but the sky, which is more than most of us get.