Two mirrored sun face tattoos with radiating rays on the backs of two hands pressed together, in dark grey ink on a wooden floor.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Mirrored sun faces on two hands

Hand · Black and grey · Photo

Two identical sun faces with closed eyes and short rays face each other across the backs of the hands, with the design continuing towards the wrists below. The linework is solid and fairly bold, filled in dark blue-grey ink, with no shading or additional colour. The hands are pressed together in the centre of the frame against a brown wooden floor.

Hand Sun Ray

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The rule in Hollin Wood is that the two suns must never open their eyes at once, and you learned it before you could spell it. Your grandmother pressed her palms together over your bowl of porridge and showed you how the faces met at the seam, eyes shut, rays tangled like wet bracken. 'One wakes, the other sleeps,' she said. 'Otherwise the afternoon forgets to end.'

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Years on, you are the one who walks the path past the last cottage with a lantern, in case the mist lies thick over the stile. The village calls the suns Ada and Ivo, after two drowned boatmen, though nobody remembers which was which. Each dusk you press your hands together on the cold stone of the well and count to nine, the number your grandmother taught you, and feel the warmth move from one side to the other like a slow argument that neither side wants to lose.

The autumn the miller's boy goes missing among the oaks, you do not sleep. You stand at the forest edge with the lantern held high and one eye open to the sky, and the answering pressure comes from the other side, a stir beneath your ribs, as if someone has turned over in a bed you share. You do not call for help. You lift your hands and let the light out through the gap between your fingers, and the thin gold beams find the boy sitting on a fallen trunk, blinking and dazzled, waiting for the day to tell him which way is home.

By morning the mist has gone and the boy is asleep in his mother's kitchen. The well stone is still warm where you pressed it. Neither sun has opened fully. They have only agreed, once more, to take turns.