Black ink drawing of a sun and crescent moon inside a geometric mandala with stars, dotted lines and swirling clouds, sketched on a notebook page.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Sun and moon mandala design in ink

Geometric · Black and grey · Flash

A pen drawing of a sun with a crescent moon at its centre, framed by a star-shaped border and concentric circles. Fine linework, dotted rings and stippled shading give the sun and cloud swirls texture, with small stars and dotted trails scattered around the edge. The drawing is in black ink on off-white paper, photographed at an angle on a spiral notebook.

Geometric Dotwork Sun Moon Star Mandala Cloud Compass Dotted line Celestial

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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 sun was never meant to sit in the middle of the tent, but Mr Ashdown insisted on hanging the old canvas disc there, painted gold and speckled with tin stars, because the ringmaster's wife had said the moon should have a mate. I was the one who climbed the ladder every evening to light the lamps behind it. Nobody else would go up past the second rung after the autumn the rigging gave way.

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The circus had been dying for three summers. We sold the elephant to a farm in Shropshire, then the trapeze wire, then the calliope with its missing keys. What remained was a crescent moon made of cardboard, a band of fourteen performers, and a dog called Pilot who could tell the hour by sulking. On the last Friday of September, the wind came off the fens hard enough to lift the big top like a loose sheet, and the moon tore free of its cord and sailed out over the car park, turning over and over until it caught on the church spire in Little Dunmere.

I walked there at dawn with Pilot trotting ahead, following the dotted trail of tent pegs and torn ribbon we had left in the grass. The spire was grey with frost. The moon hung on the weathercock, ragged at one edge, perfectly still. I stood beneath it for a long time, trying to decide whether a moon that had come down from a circus was ours to take back. In the end I left it where it was. Pilot sat down in the wet grass and would not be moved, and I understood that he had already decided for both of us.