Black ink drawing of seven moon phases stacked in a vertical column, each filled with floral linework, on a sketchbook page beside a fineliner pen.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Seven moon phases with floral fills

Fine line · Black and grey · Flash

Seven circular moon phases, from a thin crescent at the top to a waning crescent at the bottom, are stacked in a vertical column. Each phase is filled with delicate floral and patterned linework in black ink, with varying line density across the set. The drawing sits centred on a white sketchbook page with a black fineliner pen lying across the lower edge.

Fine line Botanical Moon Moon phase Flower Floral Pattern Sketch

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

The fourth moon would not sit still on the page, so Ruth Calloway pinned the paper flat under the lamp and went back to the cornflower. It had to be the blue kind that grew at the edge of the barley above Cley, because the widow had asked for something a person could find in a hedge. Seven moons, the letter said, one for each night her husband had been at sea before the Margaret Ann went down off Blakeney. She was to fill each one with whatever was blooming that week, and Ruth had been doing exactly that since March, walking the lanes with a tin for cuttings and a fineliner in her apron pocket.

Keep reading

The first moon had been easy, a thin paring of white filled with hawthorn, all bud and no promise. The second was meadowsweet, the third a clump of poppies she had been forced to draw from memory because the field had been cut. By the middle of the column the work had grown thick, every line she added a small argument with the ink. The bottom moons thinned as the lunar cycle thinned, and she found that the fineness of the linework was doing the grieving for her, the way the light did in the sitting room of a house where nobody had come home.

On the last night she sat with the seventh moon for a long time. It was a waning crescent, shaped like a dropped sickle, and the only flower she could think of was bramble, which grew thorny and wild on every verge and never once asked permission. She drew the leaves first, then the fruit, and then the blackberries were so dark they bled into the edge of the paper. When she finished, she pressed a single cornflower between two sheets of blotting paper, clipped the sketch in place, and laid her pen across the lower edge of the page so the widow would know the work was done.