Purple plumeria flowers with a black-outlined sun and tribal bands tattooed across a person's upper back, photographed from behind.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Plumeria and sun on upper back

Botanical · Back · Mixed · Photo

A large tattoo across the upper back shows a cluster of plumeria flowers in shaded purple and pink, arranged around a partly rayed sun. Bold black linework outlines the flowers and sun, with black tribal-style bands curving around the design. The shading is soft on the petals and the composition is centred on the shoulder blades.

Botanical Back Plumeria Flower Sun Ray

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The sun had been hanging too low over Mauru Bay since the dry season began, scorching the taro and making the children cry at noon, so Ruta Veli took her grandmother's shell knife and walked up the headland to ask it to climb back where it belonged.

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The plumeria trees stood along the ridge that year, heavy with flowers that smelled of the cool hours before dawn. Ruta cut one cluster, pink at the edges and purple where the petals curled, and held it up into the glare. "I will trade you these," she said, "for a higher sky." The sun laughed, its rays spilling down her arms like thin silver wire, and said flowers were a poor price for a season of shade.

Ruta answered that the flowers would not wilt on the sun's own ground. She set the cutting at the rim of the sky, where the light was thinnest, and each evening a petal dropped from the branch into the sun's fire and drifted back up, tinted with its colour. By the end of the dry season the blossoms had crept along the edge of the sun itself, and it rose a hand's width higher every morning.

The village still tells this when the heat comes down. Ruta never got her shade, but Mauru Bay has never been short of flowers since, and if you watch the sun go down you can see the petals falling from its edge, one at a time, for whoever is brave enough to climb the ridge and catch them.