Two script lettering tattoos with small orange sun designs, one reading You are my sunshine on the upper back and one reading My only sunshine on the upper arm.

Matching sun and sunshine lyric tattoos

Lettering · Back · Mixed · Photo

The image shows two matching tattoos, one on the upper back beside a pink lace garment and one on the upper arm. Each has black script lettering with a small sun whose rays are drawn in black linework and whose disc is shaded in orange. The composition is close and well lit, with the lettering sitting horizontally across the skin.

Lettering Back Upper arm Sun Sunshine Script Lettering Ray Text

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The big top has been patched so many times that its sun looks like it is squinting, and you are the one who has to paint it back. Sat on the lorry tailgate outside Shrewsbury with a tin of orange lake and a brush worn to a stub, you mix the colour the way your grandfather taught you, a marmalade that will still show from the back row. Nobody in the field is buying tickets any more. Mr Pellow counts the takings in the caravan, says the sums don't add up, and you nod, because you have heard it every night since March.

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The lettering goes on last. Ivy Marsh, who lays out the wardrobe and sings in the sideshow, asks for the words along the ticket booth in black, the old script her mother used to hum over the washing. You are the only one who can make the curl on the Y without wobbling. You draw the rays first, twelve thin spokes, then the disc, then the line running along the board. She stands with her hands in her cardigan pockets and says the people in Ludlow will come if they see the sun. You don't believe her, but you paint it anyway.

On the last night the wind lifts the tent flap and the light falls across the sawdust. A boy from the next town climbs onto the bench and reads the words aloud, slowly, the way you read a shop sign. The ring is half empty, but the rays throw a shadow that reaches all the way to the stalls, and you realise it is the lettering they will remember, not the acts.

In the morning you pack the brushes in the order you found them. The lorries roll east with the tent folded in the back, and the painted sun goes with them, wrapped in tarpaulin beside your tins.