Back view of a person with long dreadlocks and a teal headwrap, showing a large black sun tattoo across the upper back and a butterfly tattoo on the shoulder.

Sun design across a back with butterfly on shoulder

Back · Mixed · Photo

A large sun-like motif with long, flowing rays fills the upper back, drawn in bold black linework with grey shading and scattered small dots. On the left shoulder, partly hidden by hair, sits a butterfly tattoo with a small red element beside it. The background is a plain pale wall, and the subject is photographed from behind in soft, even light.

Back Shoulder Sun Butterfly Ray Dot

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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

Hold the ladder steady, lad, and stop watching the gulls. The sun doesn't care for gulls. Up on the moor road there was a man who painted the sun on his cottage wall every October so it would know where to find its way back, and one winter, when the fog rolled in thick off the harbour, he went out to fetch the cow and nobody saw him again. That's the tale, and you'll hear it right, because I'm the last one left who was alive to hear how it ended.

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His name was Ossian Pell, a net-mender with tar under his nails, and what he drew was a face with rays that ran off the edge of the plaster like hair in a gale. Black line for the rays, grey wash for the shadow under them, and between the rays he pressed the tip of his brush down once for every day the light had held. The children counted them. Two hundred and eleven dots the year the herring failed. Every one of them a day somebody in this village had got through.

When the fog took him, his widow Hester would not paint over the sun. She sat beneath it with a jar of pale marsh moths she'd been keeping on the dresser, the ones that come up out of the reeds in spring, and she waited for first light. The plaster went gold at the edges. She lifted the lid, and the moths climbed up through the rays as if someone had drawn them there.

I won't tell you what Hester said to the fog, because she never said it to me. But she said it loud enough for the whole street to hear, and the next morning the sun came up over the harbour wall like it had been sent for.