Colour tattoo of a sun with a face above a column of planets running down the spine on a woman's back, photographed from behind.

Sun and planets down the spine

Realism · Back · Colour · Photo

A woman with long dark hair sits with her back to the camera, showing a tattoo of a radiating sun with a face at the top of her spine. A column of planets descends the spine, decreasing in size, with one large banded orange planet near the middle. The shading gives the sun and planets a soft, dimensional look against plain skin, with warm oranges, reds and teal tones.

Realism Back Sun Planet Solar system Spine Celestial

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mrs Tully swore the sun had a face on it that spring, and nobody in Little Wenning believed her until the thaw came late and the sun hung over the mill chimney like a copper pan with eyes. It squinted at the valley. It frowned at the sheep. Old Abel Strode, who kept the sluice gates and trusted nothing he could not measure with a rule, said the thing was simply wrong, and he climbed the church tower with a ladder and a lamp to see for himself.

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He came down with dust on his coat and a theory in his mouth. The sun, he said, had been handed its children like a mother handing out marbles, and each one had rolled a little further from her hand than the last. Mercury was a bead no bigger than a pea. Venus wore a cloud coat. Mars had rusted red in the rain. Jupiter, banded like a boiled sweet, had grown greedy and taken more room than all the rest. Past the teal marbles of the far ice, the sun grew lonely, and that loneliness, Abel reckoned, was why the spring ran late.

The children took it from there. Ruth Pell, who was nine and had no fear of heights, carried a ball of tarred string up the tower and tied one end to the sun's gilded rays. Then she lowered it, bead by bead, past the big striped planet and the small rusty one, down to the last cold pebble at the bottom, so that the whole column hung from the sky like a plumb line dropped onto the valley floor. The grown-ups said it was nonsense. Still, nobody cut the string.

On the third morning the sun came up on time, yellow and ordinary, with no face on it at all. Mrs Tully stood at her door with a bucket of milk and squinted up. "Looks tired," she said, and went back inside to bake.