Black and grey dotwork flash design of an ornate central motif with crescent moons and geometric diamonds on a white background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Ornamental dotwork design with crescent moons

Dotwork · Black and grey · Flash

The drawing shows a symmetrical ornamental design with a fleur-like finial at the top, a lace-like central panel and a row of diamond shapes spreading outwards. Crescent moons sit along the lower edges and beneath the centre. The design uses fine stippled dotwork shading and outlines in black ink on white, with no colour.

Dotwork Geometric Mandala Crescent moon Diamond Ornament Lace pattern

Find an artist for this

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 down, sit down, and mind the cat, she's been at the pie dish again. You'll want to hear about Nell Pargeter, who lived above the chemist's on Sheep Street the year the fair flooded, and who made bobbin lace for the whole valley because her eyes were sharper than anyone else's.

Keep reading

The lace she made for the Whitsun dance was a thing of grief and patience. She pricked her pattern onto card with a pin, a fleur at the top like the lily carved over the church door, then a long panel of mesh so fine you could read the hymn numbers through it, and beneath that a row of diamonds fanning outwards like a skirt on a waltzing girl. Along the hem she set little crescent moons, one for every night her husband had been away at the pit, sorting the wagons and not coming home till the lamps were lit.

Now here is the turn. The Whitsun committee wanted that lace for the Queen's cup, and they sent a man down from London to judge it. He held it up to the window a long while, then said the moons were facing the wrong way, that a fleur ought to point at the sky. Nell told him the sky had been in the wrong place all winter, folded the lace into her apron, and walked home without a word.

When the water came up the street that November, the only thing in Nell's front room the flood did not carry off was the lace, because she had pinned it to the altar cloth in the chapel and gone up to sit with it. The man from London never came back to Sheep Street. The moons are still on that hem, though, every one of them facing the wrong way, just as she meant them.