Black and grey dotwork tattoo of a mountain peak and moon inside a circle, placed on the calf.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Mountain and moon in a dotwork circle on a calf

Dotwork · Calf · Black and grey · Photo

A circular tattoo shows a snow-capped mountain peak with a moon above it, the sky built from fine stippled dots. The lower half of the circle is filled with solid black and dark tree shapes that suggest a reflection or treeline. The work is entirely black and grey and sits centred on a smooth, hairy limb against a plain pale background.

Dotwork Blackwork Calf Mountain Moon Circle Tree Landscape Reflection

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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 lot of you, and mind the goat, she was here first. You want to know why the peak above Hesk wears the moon like a brooch? Then hush and listen, because I will not tell it twice before the fire dies.

Keep reading

Before the terraces were cut, there was a shepherd called Odra who could not sleep. Each night the moon climbed out of the notch between the peaks and rolled down the scree to the lake below, where it floated like a coin nobody wanted to spend. Its light woke the sheep, and the sheep wandered off after it into the dark, and Odra spent her nights hunting bleating wool through the reeds.

So she took a bronze sickle up the mountain in the dry month and found the moon sitting on a ledge, combing silver hair in the water. "Go back to the sky," she said. The moon only laughed, and the laugh rippled out across the lake and turned the far shore's pines into black, wavering shapes that never quite kept still.

Odra sat down beside it, because she was tired, and the two of them argued until the stars went pale. In the end she built a ring of stones around the pool so the moon could not roll away, and the moon agreed to stay if it could hang its reflection above the trees forever. Look there, above the snow, where the sky is dotted like a starling's egg. That is the moon's side of the bargain. And the trees in the water are Odra's side, dark and steady, so her sheep can sleep.