Colour tattoo of a yellow and orange sunburst with a long thin purple line crossing the upper chest near the shoulder.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Sunburst and line across the shoulder

Shoulder · Colour · Photo

A radiating sunburst of yellow and orange rays with dark tips sits on the upper chest, with a long thin purple line running diagonally across it. The rays use soft shading and dark edging, while the line has a segmented dark stripe. The background is dark and the skin is lightly flushed around the design.

Shoulder Sunburst Ray Line Sun

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Brother Anselm had kept the sundial on the south wall of Saint Oswy's for forty years, until rot got into the gnomon and it fell to me to make a new one. Nobody else in the house could read a bearing. I had a brass plate from a Durham foundry, a plumb bob, a surveyor's chain borrowed from the parish and never returned, and the abbot's permission to trample two good mornings of his lettuce.

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The hard part was the line. A gnomon is only as honest as the thread that sets it true, and the old one had been dragged east by a century of frost. I ran the chain from the chapel door to the far corner of the herb garden and pegged it, then sighted down it with one eye shut while the bell for Sext rang over the wet grass. Brother Wystan said I looked like a heron trying to remember a hymn.

On the feast of Saint Brendan the sun cleared the yew at the very minute the shadow touched the mark for noon. I stood in the cold with my hands buried in my sleeves and wept like a fool. Nobody saw, or if they did they were kind enough to look at the lettuce.

That evening I walked the chain back up to the parish house, coiled it on the step, and found the abbot waiting with a lamp. He asked whether the thing would hold. I told him it would hold until someone moved the yew, and he laughed and said that was the most honest answer he had heard from a man in a habit all year.