Black and grey photo of a woman's bare upper back with a sunburst and a vertical column of planetary symbols tattooed beside the spine.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Sun and planetary symbols down a back

Back · Black and grey · Photo

A black and white photograph of a woman seen from behind, with long hair falling over one shoulder and a dark draped top leaving her upper back bare. A sunburst design sits at the top of the back, with a vertical column of planetary and alchemical-style symbols running down beside the spine. The fine black linework is crisp against the skin, and the ornate mirror frames in the background frame the subject in the composition.

Back Sun Sunburst Star

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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

Pick that one up, Tom, and mind the bruise, it'll go brown before it goes sweet. No, not that one, the one with the sun's own colour on it. There. Now listen, because I'll only tell it while the wasps are drunk on the windfalls.

Keep reading

Old Ambrose Quill kept this orchard when the village was still called Hollin Ford, and he kept seven trees in a ring by the wall, one for each of the wandering stars the alchemists wrote on their jars. Sun at the top, the bright one, with its fruit gold as a ha'penny. Then down the row came Moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn, each grafted to a different stock and each ripening in its own week. He kept a ledger for them. Every apple counted, every frost noted in brown ink.

The year the blight came up from the river, Ambrose's granddaughter Nell refused to let the Saturn tree go. It was black and cankered and it wanted cutting. She sat under it all one night with a candle and a copper pot, boiling down the sap the way her grandfather had taught her, muttering the names of the planets in order like a rosary. By morning the bark had split open and the sap ran clear as window glass.

Her grandfather never forgave her the wasted pot, and the village never forgave her the cider she sold after, which tasted of frost and iron and made men speak their minds. Some say the sun tree still fruits first each August, and if you stand in the ring at dusk and count the planets down the rows, the last apple falls into your hand. Put that windfall in your pocket, Tom. It's the Sun's, and it'll keep you warm all winter.