Two colour flash designs on a white background: a blue water and red flame yin-yang, and a sun and moon face in blue and gold, in a traditional style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Yin-yang fire and water with sun and moon face

Traditional · Colour · Flash

The image shows two separate colour tattoo designs on a plain white background. On the left, a yin-yang symbol is split into a blue water swirl and a red and orange flame with black flame shapes. On the right, a face is divided down the middle, with a cratered blue moon on one side and a golden sun with flames radiating outwards on the other, eyes closed. Both designs use bold black outlines and solid flat fills of colour.

Traditional Yin yang Fire Water Flame Sun Moon Face Wave

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The thaw came early that year, and the pass road ran with meltwater like a river that had forgotten its bed. Ysolde Marr stood at the cairn with her goat on a rope and watched the two lights come down the valley, one from the sunrise col and one from the moonward side, and she knew they were quarrelling again because the snow on the north slope had gone to steam.

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The old women told it this way. Sun and moon had once been a single face that walked the high pass with no need of a road. It could not look both ways at once, so it asked a frost-giant for a knife, and the giant gave it a blade of ice. The face split down the brow. Sun took the fire and the gold and the flames that stood out round its head. Moon took the water, the craters and the cold. Each one wanted the pass for its own, and every time they crossed it they set the snow alight or froze the streams to glass.

Then a shepherd's boy called Tobin climbed up with a lamp in one hand and a wooden bowl of water in the other. He did not shout. He set the bowl on the flat rock between them and lit the lamp beside it. The water caught the flame and gave it back, and for the first time in a hundred winters each of them saw the other's face looking up out of the bowl, the fire in its eyes and the water in its craters, and neither could pretend the other was not there.

They still share the pass now, one taking the day and one the night. At dusk the shepherds leave bread on the cairn. Ysolde pressed her palm to the stone and felt one side warm as a loaf and the other cold as a well, and she left her crust in the middle, where the two halves met.