Black ink drawing of an ornate crescent moon filled with lattice patterns and scroll filigree on a cream background, shown as a tattoo design.

Ornate crescent moon design

Geometric · Black and grey · Flash

A crescent moon drawn as a bold outline, with its thick outer band filled with a repeating interlaced lattice of triangles and loops. The inner edge carries curling scrollwork and small leaf-like motifs in fine, even linework. The moon sits centred on a pale cream background with no shading, and the ink reads as dark purple-grey.

Geometric Moon Crescent Lattice Scroll Filigree Pattern

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mother Ashby kept her lantern lit at the bow of the narrowboat Wren, though the moon was up and the cut ran bright enough to read a face by. She had never trusted a crescent. Her grandmother had said the moon was a lace curtain pulled half across the sky, and that its edges were worked in knots no hand could finish. Any woman who tried would find the moon tangled in her net and drag it down into the water.

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Her son Tobias did not believe any of this. He was nine and wanted to be a lock keeper, so he laughed when she tied a rag of red thread to the tiller. That night he slipped it off and tied it round the weir gate instead, because the gate creaked and he liked the sound. Before dawn the cut was silver from bank to bank, and the moon had come down to lie in the shallows, its horns hooked on the gate like a fish.

Mother Ashby went out in her nightdress with the boathook. She did not pull the moon free. She sat on the lock beam and began to count the lattice on its rim, one triangle, then a loop, then a triangle, the way her grandmother had taught her to count stitches in bobbin lace. Tobias watched from the cabin door. By the time the sun came up pale over the reeds she had worked the knots back into order, and the moon rose out of the water, lighter than it had gone in, and climbed the sky unhurried.

Tobias kept the red thread. He never tied another rag to a tiller. Some nights, when the cut was still, he could see the scrollwork along the inner edge of the moon curling a little tighter, as if someone had been mending it.