Hand-drawn sun mandala design with yellow petals, black and grey zentangle patterns and the script words Live by the sun, Love by the moon around a yellow centre.

Sun and moon mandala with script text

Mixed · Flash

A hand-drawn design of a sun-like mandala with layered yellow petals, each decorated with radiating line patterns. Black and grey zentangle-style linework fills the left side of the circle, while the right side is a plain yellow disc with the script words Live by the sun and Love by the moon. The design is drawn on a white background with ink outlines and coloured shading.

Sun Moon Mandala Script text Petal

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mam had the kitchen clock set ten minutes fast so the men on nights could be out of the bath before the whistle, and Ruth hated it, because it meant she was always running for the bus with her hair still wet. Across the road, Owen Price leaned on the gate in his pit boots, his lamp cap pushed back, catching the streetlight like a coin.

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"You'll miss the bus," he said, though he was the one going down at eleven and she was coming up at seven, and neither of them had ever managed to be on the same side of the day for long.

She had drawn the thing for him the week before on the back of a wages slip, a ring of petals coloured in pencil crayon while the kettle boiled. The left half she had filled with black ink, all the tight curls and scallops her nan used to doodle on church envelopes, because nights were close and full of small work. The right half she left plain yellow for the daylight, and across it she wrote Live by the sun in her best hand. Along the dark side she wrote Love by the moon, as though the two halves were a fair division.

Owen unfolded it under the lamp and read it twice. "Colliery's putting men on days from October," he said. "Surface work, Bevan says. Nobody's going to ask whether I want it."

"Do you?"

He looked at the yellow half for a long time, then at the black, and she watched him trying to decide which one had been meant for him. Then he folded the slip into quarters and tucked it behind the buttoned flap of his shirt pocket, where the coal dust could not get at it. "Tell your mam the clock's right," he said. "I'll be early for once."