Black line drawing of a sun with a plain circular centre and wavy, flame-like rays, shown as a tattoo design on white.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Outlined sun with wavy rays

Black and grey · Flash

A black outline drawing of a sun, with a plain circle at the centre surrounded by a ring of long, wavy rays that taper to points. The linework is smooth and uniform with no shading, and the design is shown in black on a white background, centred in the frame.

Sun Ray Circle Flame

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The doldrums had taken the wind out of the Calder Rose eleven days before, and Tobias Wray kept the count in chalk on the binnacle. Each morning the sun rose like a coin dropped into still water, round and white, its rays hanging motionless around it. Captain Hesketh said the heat made them look like flames, and that a man who stared at the sun long enough would start seeing things that were not there.

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Tobias did not stare at the sun. He stared at the chart box, where his mother had stitched a sun into the lid lining in black thread, the rays long and wavering like smoke off a candle. She had done it the winter his father's ship went down off Finisterre. A sun on a box, she said, meant the man who carried it would come home. Tobias had never believed her, but on the eleventh morning, when the cook came up shouting that the casks were low, he found his thumb tracing the stitches, ray to circle, circle to ray, the way you follow a road you already know.

The breeze came at noon from the south-west, so thin it barely lifted the ensign. Hesketh stood at the wheel with his mouth open, then shut it, and laughed like a boy. Tobias opened the chart box on the hatch. The sun in the lining had no colour, only the black thread, but in the moving light it seemed to waver, as if it had caught the wind before the ship did.

They reached Lisbon nine days later with six casks of water and a patched mainsail. Tobias never spoke of the box. That night he sewed one more ray into the lining, a crooked line near the edge, because his mother had always left one loose on purpose. A sun, she said, should never be quite finished.