Two matching black sun designs with yin yang centres sit on the upper thighs of a person in denim and white shorts.

Matching sun and yin yang designs on two thighs

Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

Two identical sun designs with yin yang centres sit on the thighs of a person wearing denim and light blue shorts. The linework is black and fairly fine, with radiating petals, small dots and teardrop shapes around each circle. The skin is light and the image is a plain outdoor shot on pavement, with the designs as the only colour-free focus.

Thigh Sun Yin yang Dot Petal

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You learn the bakery's hours by smell before you learn them by the clock. At ten to five you are already scoring loaves, because your hands are steadier than Nell's before the first coffee. Tanner Street is still dark except for the proving room, where the dough sighs under its cloths, and the radio murmurs the shipping forecast like a rosary. Nell is at the far bench, dusting flour across the marble with the back of her wrist and humming the same two bars she has hummed since you were both fourteen and sharing a bus pass.

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Every morning you make the sun. It is a small ritual nobody asked for: a cross of cuts, then a ring of short slashes, then dots of semolina pressed in with your little finger where the light would fall. Nell does the other half. On the rye she draws the dark curl, on the white the pale one, and when the two loaves sit side by side on the peel they look like one thing that agreed to be split. Customers buy them without knowing. Mr Okafor from the chemist once asked whether the design was a brand, and you said it was a promise, then felt foolish for saying it.

The oven door opens at quarter past five. Heat rolls over your forearms and the crust begins its thin crackle, the applause bread makes as it cools. Nell tilts her head toward the window, where the pavement has turned from ink to pewter. Look, she says, and you do, and for a moment the street is grey and the sky above the chimneys is not yet anything at all.

Then it breaks. A band of orange slides over the slate roofs and lands across the flour on the bench, and the two of you stand in it with your hands still dusty, passing the last loaf back and forth until it is warm enough to tear. You break it in half. The crumb is pale on one side and dark on the other, and neither of you has to say which of you gets which.