Back view of a woman with her hair up, showing a small black tribal-style sun with a spiral centre on her upper back, near the shoulder blade.

Small black sun tattoo on upper back

Back · Black and grey · Photo

A small black sun motif sits on the upper back, just below the nape of the neck. It has a spiral centre surrounded by tapered, wavy rays drawn in solid black linework. The photograph is taken from behind with warm, low light, and the subject's face is not visible.

Back Sun Spiral Ray

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The sun came down into the Aldergate orchard the summer the bees went quiet, and Mabel Ruck found it sleeping in the bottom row of Bramley trees, curled tight as a snail shell with its rays folded flat against the grass. She had come out with a basket and a grudge against the wasps, and she stood a long while looking at it before she dared to touch it with the handle of her rake.

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It woke slowly, the way old dogs do, and the spiral at its heart unwound until she could see the grooves of it, dark as ink on a wet slate. It asked her for water. She had none, so she gave it the windfalls, one by one, and it ate them whole, and each apple it swallowed made the wavering rays along its edge grow a little sharper, a little longer, until the grass around it began to scorch in neat black lines.

By the end of August the whole row of trees had gone gold and heavy, and the wasps had given up and gone to the church. The sun did not leave. It sat in the orchard's heart and wound its light around every trunk, and when the first frost came it was the only thing in the valley still warm enough to touch.

Mabel's father had always said the sun belonged to the sky. She stopped telling him about it by October, and kept the basket by the back door, where the late light came in low and spun its small tight coil across the floorboards each evening, as though it had only stepped inside to rest.