Colour tattoo of a black circle with branching lines and radiating orange, red and blue rays on the upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Sunburst circle on upper arm

Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A solid black circle sits at the centre of the design, with fine branching lines drawn in orange across its surface. Long, feathered rays in orange, red, pink and blue spread outwards from the circle, with the blue and purple strokes fading into the skin. The bright colour dominates against the black centre and the pale wall behind the arm.

Upper arm Circle Sunburst Ray Abstract

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Tom,

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The frost has been on the top field since Tuesday and the ewes have stopped lifting their heads at the gate, so you can tell me the milk price is fine and I will believe you. I keep thinking instead about August, the afternoon the sun went out over Hallam's Bottom.

Dad had us all in the yard with a square of smoked glass he'd kept from the old tractor windscreen. Mrs Pryor came up the lane with the boy on her hip, and the hens went to roost at half past two as if somebody had rung a bell. When the moon slid across, the sun went black in the middle, a clean dark coin with fine cracks running through it, and round its edge the light came out in long streaks. Orange, then rose, then a blue that thinned to purple and faded into the air like paint running down a wall. I thought of your drawings on the backs of the feed sacks.

The boy wanted to know if it would stay that way. Dad said no, and that it never did, and then he went quiet in the way he does when he has been wrong about the weather. We stood there until the edge came back bright and the cows lowed in the far barn as though they had been holding their breath too.

I have the smoked glass now, on the windowsill over the sink. Some mornings the frost on the pane catches the low sun and throws the same thin orange threads across the kitchen, and I stand with my tea and let them run. Come at Easter if the roads allow. I'll show you the glass, and you can tell me what the light was doing that day, because I was too busy looking at it to see.

Love, Maud