Black ink line drawing of an ornate crescent moon mandala with dotwork, paisley-like motifs and a central flower, drawn on white paper as a tattoo design.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Ornate crescent moon mandala design

Dotwork · Black and grey · Flash

A black ink drawing on white paper shows a crescent shaped ring filled with geometric panels, arches, dots and stylised leaves. A small five-petalled flower sits at the centre, framed by curling stems and a pointed motif at the top. The linework is clean and even, with the design built from symmetrical repeated shapes and dotted fills, and no colour is used.

Dotwork Geometric Crescent moon Mandala Flower Leaves Dot

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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

The drawing had been pinned to the workshop wall for eleven days before anyone thought to ask who had made it. Dot Varley, who ran the night shift at the tile works in Stoke, swore it had come up from the kiln store with a spoiled glaze batch, rolled inside an old ledger. Nobody at the works drew like that. The lines were too even, the dots too patient.

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I took it home on a Thursday, when the trams stopped at ten and the streets off the Potteries road went blue under the lamps. I laid it on my kitchen table beside the tin of pencils and worked out the repeats. Every arch answered the one across the circle. Every leaf turned its back on the flower at exactly the same angle. Whoever drew it had counted the panels against the moon, not the other way round, and had left the small five-petalled flower at the centre where the crescent's mouth would close.

On the Friday I found the ledger's first page. A tiler's name, Edith Coombes, 1911, and beneath it a column of figures: tiles per arch, dots per panel, nights worked. The last entry read, "Moon finished. Flower to go on when the glaze is right." The foreman's note underneath said the glaze never came right, and the piece was never fired.

I borrowed the kiln key from Dot that night and fired a tile from the drawing, the crescent pressed in white on black clay. It came out of the heat with the flower standing clear in the middle, bright as a struck match. I hung it above the door of the works, where the night shift walks under it going out. Nobody has asked whose it is. Dot says the glaze looks right to her, and that is good enough for the works.