Black and grey dotwork tattoo of seven moon phases stacked vertically down the inner forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Seven moon phases in dotwork on a forearm

Dotwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A vertical column of seven circles sits along the forearm, each showing a different moon phase from full shading at the top to a lighter outline at the bottom. The phases are built from stippled dots, with denser dots creating the shadowed areas and sparser dots forming the lit edges. The photograph is black and white, with the arm shown against a dark background and the wearer's crop top and jeans visible at the edge of the frame.

Dotwork Forearm Moon Moon phase Circle Dot Celestial

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Brother Anselm sends his greetings from Hollin Abbey, and begs you not to laugh at the state of my fingers. For eleven days I have sat at the north window with a crow quill and a pot of ink, pricking dots into paper for Prior Edwin's new almanac. He wants the moon drawn at each stage of its turning, seven of them in a column, so that a farmer can lay his finger on the page and know when to sow. I told him the eye cannot tell a shadow from a stain, and he said that was why he had asked me and not a stain.

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Each circle takes me most of a morning. The dark part must be dotted close, the dots crowding like starlings on a roof, and the lit edge must be left to sparse pricks so the paper shows through and the moon seems to catch light from somewhere beyond the frame. When I stop to rest my wrist I look across the cloister garth at the real thing rising over the tithe barn, and it is never the shape I last drew. Brother Oswin says I am overcomplicating a simple disc. He has never tried to hold a round thing in dots.

Yesterday I finished the waning gibbous, the sixth, and found a smudge of ink in the margin where my sleeve had brushed it. I nearly scraped the whole sheet. Instead I left it. I thought the moon has its own bruises and nobody sends it back to the press. So the almanac will go out with one flaw in it, and whoever reads it in March will never know that a clumsy monk drew the sixth moon before dawn, with the bell for lauds already ringing.