Solid black sun tattoo with wavy rays and a thin outlined centre on the upper back near the shoulder blade, in a blackwork style.

Black sun tattoo on upper back

Blackwork · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A solid black sun with wavy, pointed rays sits on the upper back near the shoulder blade. The centre disc is filled black with a thin pale outline separating it from the rays, which are also filled black. The skin is warm-toned and the image is a close crop with soft indoor lighting, and the rest of the frame shows bare back and a sliver of hair at the top.

Blackwork Back Sun Ray

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The eclipse came on the fortieth day out of Valparaiso, when the barque Helen Mercer was running south of the Horn with her topsails reefed and the cook swearing at the stove. Cornelius Vane, the second mate, had kept the tally of days in chalk on the chart-room door, and he was the one who noticed the light had gone wrong before the bell struck eight. The sea turned the colour of pewter. Then the sun, low and white, began to be bitten by something that moved faster than any cloud.

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Nobody aboard had words for it. The Dutch carpenter, Jaap Huisman, took a pot of lamp black and a brush from the paint locker and climbed the fore shrouds without asking anyone. He painted a sun on the galley hatch cover, a solid disc with a ring of pale left round its edge, and rays that curled like candle flames in a draught. He said a sun ought to look like something a man could hold in his hand if the sea ever gave it back. The captain saw the work and said nothing, which from him was consent.

When the moon slid off the sun's face, the crew stood bareheaded on the waist and watched the black disc on the hatch catch the returning light. Vane said afterwards that the painted sun was the only thing aboard that looked the same before and after. Huisman scraped his brush clean on the rail and said he had only been practising.

The ship was broken up at Pernambuco eleven years later. Vane went down to the yard with two shillings in his pocket and asked for the hatch cover. The foreman, who had never seen a sun painted black, looked at it for a long while before he named a price.