Forearm tattoo of a Zia sun symbol in black linework with red, orange, blue and green watercolour washes, shown from three angles.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Watercolour Zia sun on a forearm

Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A black-outlined Zia sun symbol with three rays on each side sits at the centre of the forearm, with a pale inner circle and blue ink dripping down below. Bold black strokes form the rays and the sun's marks, while loose red, orange, green and blue washes spread behind them to suggest watercolour. The photo shows the same forearm from three angles against a dark background.

Forearm Ray Watercolour splashes Brush stroke Ink drip Splatter

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mind the step, it's the one that gives way, and don't mind my hands, they're only flour. Pull that stool nearer the oven door. There. Now listen, because the sun does not come up in this town until the bread is out, and that is the only law my grandmother ever gave me that I still keep.

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Before the bells of St Mary's, before the milk carts, old Tomas Halloran had a bakehouse at the end of Quarry Lane with one brick oven and a sign he painted himself. Every morning he banked the fire at four and walked up to the ridge with a loaf under each arm. He would stand where the red edges of sky came in over the hedges, and he would say to the sun, I have the flour, you have the fire, shall we go on?

One February a lad from the ink-maker's came up the lane in the dark with a tin of pigments and a brush too big for his hand. He had been sent to paint the bakery's new board, but Tomas had no board, only a whitewashed wall. So the lad painted the sun straight onto the bricks in black strokes, three rays either side and a pale circle at its heart. Then he let blue run down beneath it like rain off a roof, and the loaves that morning came out the colour of apricots.

Tomas never paid him. He gave him the heel of every loaf for a year, and the lad grew into a man who painted for a living. The wall is gone now, knocked down for a tram depot, but the sun is still in my hands, in the way I turn a tray. So, the bread. Go on, lift it out. Mind the heat, and mind the light coming up behind the chimney, because it's late, and it's ours.