Close-up of a fine line outline sun tattoo on the top of a foot, with red painted toenails visible above it.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Outline sun on the top of a foot

Fine line · Other · Black and grey · Photo

A simple sun is drawn in thin dark ink on the top of a bare foot, with a small open circle at its centre and pointed rays spreading outwards. The linework is even and unshaded, and the ink reads as a dark blue-grey against warm skin. The tattoo sits in the lower left of the frame, with the toes and red nail polish across the top of the photograph.

Fine line Other Sun

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The suns were the only thing on Halden Reach that nobody had ever argued about. Forty-one of them were stencilled along the spindle corridors, each one a plain ring with rays spreading outwards, each drawn in the same thin blue-grey dye the first settlers had carried up in sealed vials. When the ink faded, somebody had to trace it back. For eleven years that somebody was me.

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My grandmother taught me the method on the scaffold outside Corridor Nine. You kept the brush loose, you never lifted it mid-ray, and you left the centre open because, she said, the sun was the part you didn't need to fill in; people's eyes did that for you. I thought it was sentiment until the spring the reactor dimmed and the lamps went amber for six weeks. Then the rings showed only where the lines were, and the children stood under the crooked suns and counted the rays out loud.

The inspector from the Central Authority arrived in the seventh week with a gauge and a clipboard. She wanted to know why I was spending dye on decoration when the scrubbers needed parts. I didn't argue. I handed her the brush and showed her the open circle, and she frowned at it for a long time.

"There's nothing in the middle," she said.

"No," I said. "That's where the light goes."

She signed the requisition that afternoon. The next morning I climbed back up to Nine, where a patch of old ink had begun to flake from the bulkhead, and started on the rays.