Black and grey dotwork sun mandala tattoo with radiating rays and oval motifs across a woman's upper thigh.

Dotwork sun mandala on a thigh

Dotwork · Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

A large radial design covers the outer thigh of a person in a black top and shorts, seated on a white couch. The central circle is surrounded by rays and rings of oval shapes, with the shading built from fine stippled dots and solid black accents. The ink is entirely black and grey, and the circular composition wraps around the curve of the leg.

Dotwork Geometric Thigh Sun Mandala Ray Circle Radial pattern Oval

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The customs woman at the stone bridge counted the sun's rays twice before she let the cart through. Rays, she said, were taxed by the spoke. Ovals were taxed by the eye. Marta had carried the little bright disc wrapped in wool for three days from the hill town of Veld, and she knew the rules: nothing that gives light crosses the border without paying.

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She had nothing to pay with but the sun itself. So she unpinned it from the wagon's lamp and laid it on the scale, a round hot thing the size of a cartwheel hub, and the clerk began to laugh. He said it was only a face that had forgotten its eyes, and pointed at the rows of little ovals that ringed it, each one with a dark dot waiting inside. Marta said nothing. Her grandmother had taught her that a toll-keeper always wants a story more than a coin.

So she told them one. It was about a sun that grew tired of watching the valley and gave its eyes away one at a time, to the shepherds, to the millers' daughters, to the widows who needed to see the road home. Each eye went out into the dark and became a lamp in a window. By the time the sun had no eyes left, it had rays only, long thin spokes reaching toward anyone still willing to look up. The clerk stopped laughing. The woman wrote something in her ledger and waved the cart through without a coin.

Past the bridge the road ran down into a valley where the lamps were already lit in every window. Marta drove slowly, the sun glowing at her back, and she counted the windows the way the customs woman had counted her rays. Every one had an eye in it. It was a fair toll in the end, for a thing that had never belonged to anyone.