Black and grey dotwork tattoo of a radiating sun with concentric circles, centred on the upper back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Radiating sun on upper back

Dotwork · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A bare upper back shows a large circular tattoo of concentric rings around a small pale centre, with long radiating rays extending outwards. The shading is built from fine stippled dots and short hatched lines, giving a soft, glowing texture. The tattoo is centred on the back with the shoulders and neck edges visible, and the background is dark and out of focus.

Dotwork Geometric Back Sun Ray Concentric circle Circle Sunburst

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mrs Pell rang the school bell every morning for forty-one years, and every morning it sounded a little flatter, as if something inside it was tired of calling children in. When the old school closed, the bell was taken down and hung in the back of the village hall, where at the reunion it swung from a hook above the tea urn.

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Nobody remembered who had first put the sun inside it. Old Mr Gaunt, headmaster before the war, used to say he had caught it in a sieve on the playground in 1911, because the morning had run on too long and the children could not finish their letters in the dark. He struck the bell with it, and it had kept the light ever since, a bright coin rattling behind the bronze. The reunion committee did not believe a word of this, but when Janet Marsh tapped the bell with a teaspoon, a thin gold line ran out of the crack and along the parquet.

The rule, as the oldest in the room remembered it, was that the sun could only be let out once every pupil had said aloud the sum they had never finished. So they went round the trestle tables. Dennis Crowe said eight sevens. Brenda Hale said the capital of Peru, and was right. Janet, who had always been good at everything but arithmetic, stood a long time with her hands in her cardigan pockets before she said, 'Nine take away four is five, and I am sorry I copied it off you.'

The crack opened. Light poured out in long spokes, through the windows and over the car park, and the rings of it settled on every shoulder in the hall like a warm hand. When it had climbed over the rooftops, Janet looked down and saw her own shadow stretched across the floor, and beside it, for the first time in sixty years, the shadow of a girl with her hand up to answer.