Colour sun tattoo with orange and yellow rays and a dark outline on a woman's upper back near the shoulder blade, in a traditional style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Colour sun tattoo on upper back

Traditional · Back · Colour · Photo

A woman with short blonde hair is photographed from behind, showing a large sun tattoo on her upper back near the shoulder blade. The sun has a glowing orange centre, surrounded by pointed yellow and orange rays with dark outlines and some shading within each ray. The background shows a swimming pool and tiled edge, and a partly visible dark tattoo sits on the left shoulder.

Traditional Back Sun Ray

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Mother,

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The floor of the new baths at Eboracum is nearly finished, and you would not believe the fuss over the sun. The steward wanted a plain gold disc in the middle of the frigidarium, the way they do it in Londinium. I told him the sun does not sit still in a room, that it burns hottest at its heart and throws its light outward in spikes. So I set the centre in tesserae of deep saffron and ochre, fired until they looked like the inside of a clay oven, and then the rays, yellow lapping into orange, each one edged in slate so the eye can find its point.

Every morning I count them again. Twenty-four rays, each the same length, or so the overseer believes. What he does not know is that the seventh ray on the northern side is a finger's width short, because the blue slate ran out and I would not send to the quarry for one stone. Nobody looks at the floor from above except the children, and they do not count.

Last night I stood in the cold room alone while the lamps burned low and the water lay still in the plunge pool. The light through the high window fell onto the sun at the angle I had guessed, and the short ray caught it and threw it back gold, as if it were the one that had been waiting to leave. I think I will sign it there, in a place no steward will check.

Your son, Lucius