Yellow sun with rays surrounded by purple scrollwork and dots, tattooed on a person's upper back near the shoulder blade.

Yellow sun with purple scrollwork on upper back

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A yellow sun with a ring of pointed rays sits at the centre of the design, surrounded by purple swirling scrollwork, dots and leaf-like shapes. The solid flat fills have a soft shaded purple background, and the outline is a darker purple. The tattoo sits on pale skin across the upper back, with the person's hair and a yellow top visible at the edges of the frame.

Back Sun Scrollwork Swirl Dot Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You are kneeling on the flagstones at six, the dew still lying on the lavender, when the gate creaks and Nan's old secateurs arrive wrapped in a tea towel. Your sister says nothing. She never does before breakfast. She just hands you the twine and nods at the wall where the clematis has come down in a purple heap, as if it had been thinking about leaving for weeks.

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The sundial stands in the middle of the bed, its brass face gone the colour of old pennies. Nan used to say the sun was the only honest thing in the garden because it never pretended to be anything else. Every morning she would lay a finger on the gnomon and call the time out loud, always ten minutes wrong, and insist it was close enough for roses. You tie the first stem to the trellis and feel the cold wire bite into your palm.

By noon the bed is bare except for a ring of gold where the marigolds were, and you understand the clematis was never what held the wall up. Your sister has gone to the village for bread. The gate stands open to the lane. You stand on the step with the secateurs in your pocket, and the dial throws its thin shadow across the stones and, for once, points at exactly the hour you are standing in.