Black and grey dotwork moon tattoo with a fine outline on the upper arm, showing craters and shaded surface detail.

Small moon tattoo on upper arm

Dotwork · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A small, round moon with craters and surface markings is tattooed on the upper arm. The surface is built from stippled dots and soft shading, with a thin black outline around the edge. The image is black and grey, centred on the arm against a plain light background.

Dotwork Fine line Upper arm Moon Crater Celestial

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The priest wanted the moon drawn full for the festival, so I sat in the scribes' yard before dawn with a reed stylus and a slab of wet clay balanced on my knee. Ink would have run in the heat, so I pressed the moon in dots, one at a time, the way my teacher had taught me to stipple the shadows of barley stalks. First the rim, a thin line of pricks the kiln would keep. Then the seas, which the old men called the dark places, dense with dots where the clay had to hold the shade.

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Shamash had climbed past the reed roof while I worked, and by the time the light was grey enough to see the ridges I had used nearly four hundred pricks. My hand ached. Amat, the girl who carried water for the kiln, stopped to watch and asked why the moon looked scarred. I told her the moon had been in fights, and that every crater was a night a god had lost his temper. She laughed and went off with her jar.

When the priest came to inspect, he turned the tablet to the lamp and frowned at the lower edge. I had left the rim a little thinner there, where the moon was starting to wane, and the dots fell away like a bitten loaf. He asked whether it was a mistake. I said the moon is never full for long. He grunted, and I could see he did not want to argue with a tablet that would outlast us both.

That night I climbed to the roof and looked at the real thing, pale and pocked above the ziggurat. I could not make out a single crater from so far, only a soft grey smudge like breath on a bowl. But my clay would carry the marks for a thousand years, and I found I liked that better than the sky.