Solid black sun design with a plain circle centre and twelve wavy flame-like rays on a white background, shown as a flash design rather than on skin.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Black sun with wavy rays

Black and grey · Flash

A solid black silhouette of a sun, with a filled circle at the centre surrounded by a thin white ring. Twelve wavy, tapering rays radiate outwards, each curling slightly at the tip. The image is a flat two-tone graphic on a plain white background, centred with even spacing.

Sun Ray Circle

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The ferry-woman would not take the cart across the salt flats until Tamsin unwrapped the sun and held it up to the lamp. It was no bigger than a cartwheel, black iron ringed with tin, and its twelve rays curled at the tips like smoke that had been told to stay. "That's no sun," said the ferry-woman. "It's dark as a boot."

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"Dark is how you carry one," said Tamsin. "My grandmother did the same. Light off a bright thing gets into your eyes and stays there. Dark you can walk with."

Her grandmother had been a smith in the Reach when the proper sun went out over the harbour, and the grey years came down like wet wool. People wanted fire. The smith would not make fire. She hammered a disc from the ballast of a wrecked sea-coach, bent the rays by hand, and taught the children to hang one on the north wall of every house, so the shadow it threw would fall where the cold came in. Folk said it kept the frost from the doorsteps, and in the grey years that was a kind of mercy.

Tamsin walked the cart across the flats through three nights. The salt took the paint off the rays and the wind hummed through the gaps between them. On the fourth morning a boy from the far village ran out to meet her, carrying a lantern with its glass blacked over with soot. "We made one too," he said, and lifted it. Light leaked through the soot in twelve thin lines, curling at the ends.

The ferry-woman took her coin and said nothing, but she hung the iron sun on her own door before the cart had turned. Tamsin did not stay to watch. Behind her, the boy turned his lantern in slow circles, and the soot-thin lines of light went round and round the dark wall like rays of something that had decided to come back.