Fine line sun with a black and white yin yang at its centre, tattooed on the top of a bare foot, with small black stars on the second foot beside it.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Sun and yin yang tattoo on a foot

Fine line · Other · Black and grey · Photo

Two bare feet rest on white bedsheets, with a fine line sun tattooed on the top of the left foot. The sun's rays are drawn in thin outline and enclose a black and white yin yang circle, while small solid black stars sit on the neighbouring foot. The soft light and rainbow patch across the sheets give the photo a warm, airy composition.

Fine line Other Sun Yin yang Star Feet

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You learn the lamp before you learn the sea. Old Tobias Wren wakes you at four with a hand on your shoulder and says the light is a thing that must be shared out, like bread. On Skerrin Rock the lamp burns from dusk until the first grey shows over the water, and in between it turns, and in the turning you learn where the dark goes.

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He shows you the brass lens in the cold lantern room, its prisms throwing rainbow patches across the whitewash when the sun comes in low. "Every light needs its shadow to be seen by," he says, tapping the pale glass with a thumbnail. He draws it for you on the back of a tide table: a sun with its rays spread like fingers, and inside it a circle split in two, white on one side and black on the other, each with a seed of the other tucked into its belly. You copy it onto the flyleaf of the log so you will not forget.

The winter the mail boat stops coming, the stores run thin and the wicks go soft with damp. You count the stars from the gallery every night, eleven, then twelve, then thirteen, marking each with a smudge of soot on the rail so the sky keeps its own accounts. Tobias coughs through January and does not come down the stairs again. You keep the lamp turning, an hour lit and an hour dimmed to spare the oil, the way he showed you.

In March the sun comes up over the mainland, which you have never seen it do before, and lays the lamp's shadow long across the water. You snuff the wick, press the tide table into the log, and write beneath the drawing: keeper, one. Then you take your coat from the hook and go down to see whether the boat is coming.