Black and grey dotwork drawing of a sunflower-style mandala with a crescent moon at its centre, shown as a design on white paper with no body placement visible.

Sunflower mandala with crescent moon

Dotwork · Black and grey · Flash

A sunflower made of layered, pointed petals surrounds a central mandala with a crescent moon and ornate patterned rings. The petals and moon are built from stippled dots and fine hatched lines, giving soft shading, while the inner mandala uses crisp black linework and solid filled shapes. The drawing is in black ink on white paper with no colour and is centred on the page.

Dotwork Botanical Geometric Sunflower Mandala Crescent moon Petal Dot Ring Pattern

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

Sit down, love, you've been on your feet since ten and that kettle won't boil any quicker for you hovering over it. Leave the lamp off. The moon through that window is all the light this ward needs at three in the morning.

Keep reading

My uncle Ivo kept the signal box at Thornleigh for thirty-one years, and every night he sat up there with a pot of Indian ink and a nib he'd cut himself. He didn't draw lines. He drew with dots, thousands of them, a fine grey sprinkle that he said was the only honest way to shade anything. The first drawing he ever showed me was a sunflower, its petals stacked like sailcloth round the rim of the page, and in the middle a crescent moon with a ring of patterns inside it, the sort of thing you'd find on a cathedral floor if the cathedral had been built by someone who couldn't sleep.

When the box was quiet he'd count the dots. Every hundred was a quarter of an hour he'd sat awake with the points and the levers and the long dark cutting. He told me a sunflower turns to follow the sun all day, and then it stops, and starts again. The moon is different. It doesn't wait for anybody. It just comes round.

He died in the spring, in a bed much like that one, and the drawing was folded in his jacket pocket. When I unfolded it on the blanket the dots had gone soft at the edges, the way ink does when it has been held too long. I counted them anyway. There were eleven thousand, give or take, and I still don't know which of them was the night he stopped.