Flash sheet of red and blue filigree ornaments, swirls, rosettes and crescent moon phases, with the word Marked in blue script across the centre.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Red and blue ornament and moon phase flash sheet

Geometric · Mixed · Flash

A sheet of separate tattoo-style designs on a white background, including filigree ornaments, curling swirls, dotted and lace-like rosettes, and a row of crescent moon phases. The motifs are drawn in solid red and blue line and fill, with the lower row in grey and gold circular emblems. The word Marked sits in the centre in flowing blue script, and the layout is loose and scattered.

Geometric Dotwork Moon Crescent Filigree Swirl Rosette Mandala Spiral Lace Sun Star Feather Wing

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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 pattern-seller left you a folded sheet in exchange for a night's lodging, and you pinned it above the frame where the bobbins clicked all day. Red thread was for luck, blue thread was for show. Along the bottom ran the moons, waxing and waning in their little row, and you learned them the way the other girls learned hymns, tapping them out under your breath until the rhythm stuck. Nobody in Cardworth ate lace. They sold it by the yard to ships and to the widows of ships.

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The trouble began in February, when the mill owner's wife asked for a collar worked from the sheet, every rosette and spiral of it. You had copied the crescents with their horns turned the wrong way, and you didn't notice until the collar was finished and the afternoon had gone grey. Your mother said nothing. She only held the collar up to the window and turned it slowly, the way you would turn a key in a stiff lock.

That night the lamp in the back room burned low, and the lace on the frame began to glow faintly where the crescents were. Each little moon had caught a phase of the sky and kept it. By morning the fog had lifted from the pit road, and the men climbing the hill carried lamps that burned silver, not yellow, and not one of them could say why.

You unpicked the collar thread by thread until the moons were gone, and you kept the sheet in the drawer under your mother's Bible. Some nights you still take it out and look at the sun and stars in their grey circles, and you count the crescents on your fingers, waxing, full, waning, and you never again copy a moon the wrong way round.