Pen drawing on paper of a sun, a crescent moon and an ornate chained mandala-style design, held up in a room with people in the blurred background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Sun, moon and ornate chain design on paper

Geometric · Black and grey · Flash

A hand holds up a sheet of paper with a black ink line drawing of a sun with wavy rays on the left and a crescent moon on the right. Between them sits an ornate, symmetrical mandala-style motif with pointed arches, dotted lines and dangling chain-like loops along the lower edge. The drawing uses fine, even linework with dotted detail and no shading or colour, and it fills most of the frame against a plain background.

Geometric Sun Moon Mandala Chain Dot Ornament Design

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Brother Anselm wanted the sun drawn with twelve rays and I drew it with thirteen, because the twelfth had gone crooked under my pen and I would not scrape it off the vellum with a knife while he watched. He stood behind my stool with his hands folded in his sleeves, breathing through his nose the way he did when the bell for Sext ran late.

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"Thirteen is not a number the abbey recognises," he said.

"Then the abbey can count it itself," I said, and he laughed, which was the first thing I had made him do in a month.

The design was for the chapter house screen, a lattice of sun and moon meeting over a hanging canopy of chains, the sort of work the old masters cut in oak. Abbot Rainer wanted it on paper first so the carpenter from Wexford could see the rhythm of the dots. I drew the moon on the right in one long curve, then spent three evenings on the chains, each loop a little different so no two drops would look the same. I put a dot in every corner where the lines met, because a corner with no dot seemed to me like a door with no latch.

When the abbot came to see it he held the sheet up to the window and was quiet for so long the candle guttered. Then he said the moon was too gentle for a house of silence, and asked who had taught me to make a crescent look as if it were listening. I told him nobody had. He nodded as though that was the answer he expected, handed the sheet back, and went out. The screen went up that winter with the thirteenth ray still in it, catching the light that nobody else has noticed.