Solid black blackwork tattoo of a pentagram inside a circle with flame-like rays around it, placed on the upper chest below the neck.

Pentagram and sun design on upper chest

Blackwork · Chest · Black and grey · Photo

A solid black pentagram enclosed in a ring sits at the centre of a sun-like design, with tapering flame rays radiating outward. The linework is bold and filled, with no shading, and the ink is uniformly dark against pale skin. The tattoo is centred in the frame on the upper chest, with the neck and collarbone area visible around it.

Blackwork Chest Pentagram Sun Circle Flame Star

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, you, where the lamp catches. The lamp is the only thing left in this tent that still works, so mind the hole in the canvas and keep your feet out of the sawdust. Now. You've seen the sun painted on the side of the last wagon, the one with the rust eating its wheels. Do you know why it has a star in the middle, inside a ring, like a coin somebody dropped down a well?

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Old Tobias Quill painted that wagon the summer the Sunwheel Show had eleven elephants and a man who could swallow swords. He drew the sun with its flames pulled out long, like hair in a stiff wind, and he put the five-pointed star at its heart because a fortune teller in Margate told him it would keep the crowds coming back. She charged him a shilling for the tip. He paid her two.

The crowds did come back, for a while. Then the council wanted the field for houses, the elephants went to a sanctuary in Wales, and the swordswallower took a job at a dentist's in Leeds. By the last autumn there was only Tobias, a girl called Nell who could walk the high wire, and that painted sun going slowly grey on the flank of the wagon.

Nell asked him once whether the star was meant to trap the luck inside the ring. Tobias said luck was like the rain: it went where it liked, and all you got to do was stand under it. On the final night the rain came down so hard the big top sagged and folded into the mud. They stood in the wet and watched the painted sun shine black and glossy in the lamplight. Nell laughed until she cried. Tobias said that was the show, then, the one that mattered.