Hand-painted flash design on cream paper showing a red lightning bolt with a teal shadow, a black line sun with rays, and a teal teardrop.

Lightning bolt, sun and teardrop flash

Colour · Flash

A painted drawing of a tattoo design on textured cream paper. A bold red lightning bolt with a teal drop shadow sits in the lower centre, with a black outlined sun with radiating rays above it and a teal teardrop shape to the right. The black linework is clean and even, and the flat red and teal fills give the sheet a bright, graphic composition.

Lightning bolt Sun Teardrop Ray

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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 closer, the lot of you, the canvas has holes and the wind off the Humber finds every one. No, the sun can wait. Everybody wants the sun first, but the sun was never the trouble. The trouble was the bolt. Hector Vane painted it on the side of the big top the summer the Great Marvello fell over in Scarborough, and he painted it red because red was the only tin left in the wagon.

Keep reading

That bolt was meant to split the sky above the high wire. Every night it came down on cue, a sheet of tin shaken by the boy in the rafters, and every night the crowd cheered as if they'd been struck themselves. Mrs Pell, who swallowed fire and never once singed her eyebrows, said the sun on the poster was a lie. A sun that low, she said, would only ever be a lamp hung up by a tired man. So Hector gave it rays, eleven of them, and she counted them out loud each morning like a rosary.

By autumn the ticket money had gone to the coal man and the lion had gone to a farm near Beverley. The teardrop was the last thing painted, a single blue drop where the rain got through the roof. Mrs Pell stood under it with her hands folded and said, well, that's us then, a bit of weather and a bit of shine. Then she dipped her thumb in the red tin and pressed a print onto the sheet beside the bolt, the way you'd sign a letter nobody would ever read.

The circus folded at Christmas. The bolt is still in the wagon, rolled up under a tarpaulin, and if you hold it to the window in the right light you can still see her thumbprint sitting just off the edge of the sun, as if she never agreed to go out.