Black line drawing of a hand-drawn sun with rays, with the words LIFE IS TOUGH BUT SO ARE YOU lettered inside the circle, shown as a tattoo design on white.

Line drawn sun with lettered quote

Fine line · Black and grey · Flash

A simple black line drawing of a sun with a circular face and radiating rays. The words LIFE IS TOUGH BUT SO ARE YOU are hand lettered in capitals across the centre of the circle. The image is shown in black ink on a plain white background with no colour and no body part visible.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Maud had the brush clamped between her teeth when Dennis Varley leaned over the harbour wall and asked for something cheerful. 'Something folk can read while they wait for the ferry,' he said. 'Not that gloomy stuff.' She had painted sun faces before, a dozen on the fishing boats of Hollin Bay, and she knew the trick was to draw the circle first and trust the rays to follow. She drew it in one go, a little lopsided, the way her father had taught her with a carpenter's pencil.

Keep reading

She took the brush out of her mouth and spelled the words across the middle of the circle. When she stepped back, Dennis was frowning at the board. 'Life is tough,' he read aloud. 'That's not cheerful.' 'Keep going,' said Maud. 'But so are you.' He squinted at the words, then at the grey water beyond the wall, where the Thursday ferry was ploughing in against the wind with its lights already on.

He didn't say anything for a while. Gulls wheeled over the chip shop. A small boy dropped his ice cream on the slipway and looked at it with great dignity instead of crying. Dennis paid her in coins and a flask of stewed tea, and she packed up the tins of paint while he stood reading the board again under his breath, moving his lips over the second line.

The sign stayed up all winter. By March the salt had bleached two of the rays to nothing, but nobody asked her to touch them up, and Dennis started ordering a second cup whenever the ferry was late.

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