Tall red and yellow banner design of a sun with a face, a sword, a coiled red snake and hibiscus flowers, with the words Unbowed Unbent Unbroken on a ribbon.

Sun, sword and snake banner design

Neo-trad · Colour · Flash

A vertical banner design showing a sun with a face at the top, a sword running down the centre and a red snake coiled around the blade with its mouth open. Hibiscus flowers, leaves, pomegranates and small white blossoms surround the lower half, and a yellow ribbon across the bottom carries the words Unbowed Unbent Unbroken. The linework is bold and dark with detailed hatching and patterning, and the palette is mainly red, yellow and green on a patterned background.

Neo-trad Sun Sword Snake Hibiscus Flower Banner Ribbon Lettering Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit down, the lot of you. The guard will keep us another hour, so you may as well hear how the sword came to the mountain. There was a sun over the pass of Karvel that had grown so proud it would not let the snow melt on any wall, and it had a face, which is how you knew it was vain. Ask my mother's mother. She saw it with her own eyes, or said she did, which in my family amounts to the same thing.

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A snake lived in the orchard below the pass, red as a cooked pepper, and for seven summers it had been stealing pomegranates off the tax-men's carts. The tax-men came to hang it. The snake coiled itself round the blade of the captain's sword, and when he lifted it to strike, the snake opened its jaws and said, 'Bend, and I will let you keep your head.' The captain did not bend. Nor did the snake. They stood there the whole of a hot afternoon, hibiscus opening at their feet, and neither gave an inch.

Toward evening the sun grew tired of watching and came down the mountain to see what the stubbornness was about. It looked at the captain, looked at the snake, and said it had never once seen anything refuse to bow. Then it laughed, and the laughter broke the sky open with red light, and the captain's sword rang like a bell and split clean in two. The snake dropped to the grass and slid off into the orchard with the last pomegranate in its jaws.

So when the young man in the glass booth tells you to lower your head, remember the blade that would not bend and the snake that would not either. Now give me your papers, and mind the step.