Coloured illustration of an ornate sun with a human face, its rays filled with dotwork and paisley-like patterns, shown as a design drawing rather than a tattoo on skin.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Ornate sun face with dotwork rays

Dotwork · Colour · Flash

A stylised sun with a calm face at its centre, featuring arched eyebrows, a third eye motif on the brow, and a small pointed mouth. Its flame-like rays are filled with fine stippled dots, swirls and paisley-like detailing. The palette is warm ochre, orange, red and teal on a cream background, with faint ornamental patterns fading behind the central design.

Dotwork Sun Face Sun rays Flame Paisley Mandala

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Marion,

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The wasps have found the windfalls again, so I've given up on the lower rows and taken the ladder up to the Discovery trees by the wall. You'll laugh, but Mr Pryce has had a sun painted on the cider house door, a great ochre face with its rays going out like a child's drawing, and every morning I stand under it with my coffee and feel inspected. He commissioned it the summer you left, when he still believed the crop would be good. It was. Nobody has the heart to paint over it now.

Yesterday I found a box of old tools in the shed, the handles worn pale, and under them a tin of Dad's drawings. Pages of suns, every one with arched brows and a third eye pricked into the forehead, the rays crowded with dots he must have made with the point of a nib. Sixty of them, maybe more. He never sold a single one. I think he counted the dots instead of sleeping.

The last of the pickers leave on Friday. Pryce wants the orchard sold by Michaelmas, and I've said I'll help with the paperwork, though I haven't decided whether I mean it. Come up for the weekend if you can. Bring the good secateurs, the ones you hid from me. We'll take a tin of plums down to the cider house, and I'll show you the page where Dad left one ray blank, as if he'd meant to come back to it.

Love, Nell