Hand-drawn yin yang design with a coloured sun on one side and a starry moon on the other, with the words live by the sun and love by the moon.

Yin yang sun and moon design with lettering

Mixed · Flash

A yin yang circle divided into a light side with a bright orange and pink sun and a dark side with a white moon surrounded by small white stars. Sprigs of leaves and small flowers curl across the top and bottom, and the phrases live by the sun and love by the moon are written in black lettering. The drawing uses pale blue and grey washes with coloured ink, and the design is centred on the circle.

Sun Moon Yin yang Star Flower Leaves Vine Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lamps on Corran Ring dimmed at the hour the old manual called dusk, though nobody had seen real dusk for three generations. I was the one who threw the switch, forty minutes early, my palm flat on the grey panel while the engineers shouted over the channel that the greenhouse would sulk for a week.

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The painted words were still above the aft dome's lock, half flaked: LIVE BY THE SUN on one side of the arch and LOVE BY THE MOON on the other. My mother had repainted them every decade in the same blue-black ink, because she said a station that forgot its own rules would soon forget its people. I thought she was being sentimental until the day Tamsin's shift ran on full light for nine days straight and she came down the spoke grey-faced, asking for a dark room, for quiet, for anything that wasn't noon.

So I gave her the moon. The greenhouse lights faded to the pale wash of a full moon. The trailing vines we had grafted from a seed bank on Earth opened their small violet-tipped buds, the way they only do in low light, and the whole garden turned silver. Tamsin sat among them with her boots off and did not speak for an hour, and I did not ask her to.

When the lamps came up again at the proper hour, the engineers had filed their complaint and the sun was back on its arc over the fields. Tamsin had left a note on the panel in her looping hand: keep one moon a week. I have kept it. Every seventh dusk I leave the switch alone and let the stars come out in the glass, and the sun can wait its turn.