Black ink tattoo of a circular ring of stylised lettering with a central question-mark-like shape, on the inner wrist and forearm, in a Lettering style.

Black ring of stylised lettering on a wrist

Lettering · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A bold black tattoo on the inner wrist and forearm forms a circular ring built from stylised, flowing letterforms that radiate around a central open circle. A question-mark-like curve sits within the centre, with thick brush-like strokes and tapering tails. The ink is solid black on pale skin, shot at a slight angle against a plain background.

Lettering Forearm Sun Circle Lettering Ring Wrist

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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

Sit down, the wasps have had the windfalls, but there's room on the bench. You want the one about the sun that asked a question. My grandmother told it under this same tree, and she'd never let anyone leave until they'd guessed the answer, which is why nobody ever did.

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Back when the orchard was only twelve trees on a hill above Lower Crabbe, the sun came down every August to see how the Russets were coming on. It wasn't a hot sun, mind. It was a considering sun, the kind that sits low and reads the fruit like a letter. Every evening it went round the branches in a ring, asking each tree its own word. Fair. Long. Whole. Nothing answered, because apples don't answer. They just swell.

Then came a girl called Hester Dunn, who hired on for the picking with a tin whistle and no shoes. She heard the sun asking and didn't know what it wanted, so she climbed the oldest tree and asked it back. What do you want to know? The sun went quiet, the light thinned to gold across the grass, and it said: whether anything down here is glad of it.

Hester didn't answer in words. She played the one tune her mother had taught her, and every tree in the orchard dropped a single apple at the same moment, twelve soft thumps in the grass. The sun read them all, the curve of its question bent into something like a smile, and it never came back to the hill. But the ring of its letters is still up there if you know where to look, and I'd have you look, once you've finished that cider.