Traditional style tattoo of a hooded woman holding an infant in front of a sunburst, on a forearm with solid black shading around it.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Madonna and child with sunburst on a forearm

Traditional · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A hooded woman with a pale halo holds an infant against her chest, drawn with bold black outlines and flat areas of colour. A radiating sunburst fills the background behind the figures. Solid black ink covers the surrounding skin of the forearm, framing the central image.

Traditional Blackwork Forearm Woman Halo Sunburst

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The rain had been coming down on the market since before light, and by noon the gutters ran brown between the stalls. Mags Teale kept her eggs under a tarpaulin and her boy inside her shawl, and she did not look up when the grey man stopped at the edge of her pitch. He had a sunburst pinned to his coat, a brass disc with rays cut sharp as knife blades, and it was the only bright thing for a mile.

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Warm bread, he said. Heel of the loaf, if you have one. She said the last loaf was for the child, who had not eaten since the dawn bell, and that a man with a sun on his coat ought to carry his own. He smiled at that. He said he had no sun to spare, only the rain, which was not his to sell, and he would give her a coin for it all the same. The coin was thin as a fingernail and gold at one edge, and when she turned it over the wet on her knuckles dried.

She gave him the loaf anyway. Hunger, her mother used to say, does not check whose sun it is. The man broke the crust, ate it slowly with the rain running off his hat brim, and then he lifted the edge of the tarpaulin and held it there. Light came in under the canvas like butter sliding off a plate, and it lay on the eggs and on the boy's bare foot, and the child laughed out loud for the first time that week.

When she looked up the man was gone, and the rain had thinned to a drizzle that stopped above the square as if a bell had called it back. Mags kept the coin in her shawl beside the boy. Every market day since, the stall under her tarpaulin has stayed dry, and the sign she painted the next spring has rays that point, she says, to the place the loaf went.