Colour tattoo of a sun with a spiral centre and wavy green and blue rays on the inner forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Green and blue sun with spiral centre

Forearm · Colour · Photo

A stylised sun with a large spiral at its centre and wavy rays radiating outward, all outlined in dark grey. The rays and spiral are filled with green, blue and yellow ink that shades from light to dark. Small orange and red dots are scattered around the design on the surrounding skin, and the plain background is a close view of pale skin.

Forearm Sun Spiral Ray Dot

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The snow had sat on the roof of the Hollin Inn since Martinmas, and by the feast of St Brigid the innkeeper's wife had stopped sweeping the step because there was no point. Nobody came over the pass now. The sun had gone behind the ridge in autumn and had not come back, and the villagers said the old sun had grown tired of their bread-and-broth faces and gone to sleep under the mountain.

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Tamsin, the innkeeper's youngest, was nine and did not believe in sleeping suns. She took the blue jar of ink her father used for the ledgers, mixed it with the green juice of crushed pondweed, and climbed to the bell loft with a goose quill. On the cold plaster above the hearth she drew a great sun with wavering rays, curling like weed in a current, and at its heart she wound a spiral, round and round, tighter than a sleeping cat. Each ray she shaded darker towards the tip, as her grandmother had taught her to shade the sea.

The spiral took the whole night. By morning her fingers were stained to the knuckle and the ink had dried to a shine like wet glass. A tinker with a mule and no fear of mountains came in stamping snow from his boots and stopped under the drawing. He said nothing for a long time. Then he took a yellow stub of wax from his pocket and pressed a dot at the rim of each ray, and the dots glowed like coals.

Nobody told Tamsin what the tinker meant, and she did not ask. In the spring the ridge went green and the sun came back over it, and the first thing it touched was the spiral in the north window of the inn, blue and green and yellow, and warm to the hand. Her father never painted over it. The step was swept again every morning.