Black and grey tattoo design of a tooth framed by radiating lines, with the word WISDOM beneath it, in a traditional flash style.

Wisdom tooth with sunburst flash

Traditional · Black and grey · Flash

A tooth outline sits at the centre of a sunburst of black rays, with the word WISDOM set in a slab serif beneath it. The linework is bold and even, with the tooth left white inside its black outline. The design is shown on a plain white background with a soft grey shadow behind the tooth and rays.

Traditional Sunburst Ray Lettering

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The sign above my chair was painted by a Geordie who had lost the use of two fingers at Ypres, and he gave the rays a stubbornness I never managed myself. Sunburst, he called it. Every punter who climbed into my chair looked up at it and thought of the sun coming out, which was the whole trick of the business. Nobody pays a shilling to have a tooth out. They pay for the light.

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The last Saturday of the Hexham season, a lad called Eddie Quill sat down with his cap in both fists. He had driven his mother's lorry into a hedge to get the afternoon off, and his wisdom tooth had been raging for a week. I told him the trouble with wisdom teeth is that they arrive too late to be any use, after the childhood things have been settled, when a person has already made all his daft mistakes. He laughed, and that was my opening.

I gripped, I rocked, and it came away with a sound like a cork leaving a bottle. He held it up to the paraffin lamp. Small and white and quite blameless, it looked like a little moon on a pawnbroker's scale. He asked what he owed me. I said he could keep the tooth, since it was the only clever thing he had ever grown without being told to.

By dusk the tent was down and the sign lay folded in the cart with its rays bent flat. Eddie's tooth sat in a tin on my chest of drawers, shining brighter than anything the Geordie ever painted.