Small solid black yin yang tattoo on the back of a person's neck, with their hair held up to one side.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Small yin yang tattoo on the back of the neck

Neck · Black and grey · Photo

A small yin yang symbol is tattooed in solid black ink on the back of a person's neck, centred below the hairline. The hand at the top left holds the hair back, and a ring is visible on one finger. The background shows a pink leaf-patterned top, a blue strap and dark teal-tinted hair, with a warm, soft-focus light.

Neck Yin yang Circle Neck Hair

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

By the third week of October the ticket man has stopped counting, so you count for him from the back of the wagon, a habit from the days when the big top still sold out. Eleven on a wet Tuesday. Nine on Wednesday. Outside, the generator coughs and the field is the colour of weak tea, and the posters for the Halloran Sisters have been pasted over so many times that the faces have blurred into one bright, hopeful sheet.

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Your act is the globe. Two people, one painted wooden sphere the width of a cartwheel, split down a curve: one half lacquered black, the other left white in the way your grandfather painted it, with a dot of each colour set in the other's heart. You stand inside the black half while Tomas stands in the white, and you walk it slowly around the ring until the audience forgets which of you is holding it up. Tomas has been saying for a month that the bearings are going. You tell him the bearings have been going since 1974 and nobody has fallen yet.

On the last night the sphere sticks halfway round. You feel it through your soles, a shudder, then the slow pull of the pair of you leaning in opposite directions. Nobody in the seats moves. Tomas laughs once, and you laugh too, and then you both simply let the weight settle, the way you were taught as children, and the two halves turn as one until the seam is back at the top of the ring.

Afterwards you sit on an upturned crate with black paint on your palms and the tent sagging above you, and you write next season's poster in your head. Tomas says the sphere will be sold for scrap by spring. You tell him to leave the dot in the middle. Somebody should know which half is which when the lights go down.