Black and grey back tattoo in realism and geometric style, with a sun face medallion at the upper back, a tree with horse-drawn chariots at the lower back and a dotted border.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Sun face, tree and chariots across a back

Realism · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A wide back piece shows a sun-like face inside a ringed medallion at the upper back, joined by a dotted, chain-style border that narrows into an hourglass shape. The lower back holds a shaded tree with a spreading root system, flanked by two horses pulling chariots against a cloudy background, with a spoked wheel above the tree. The work is rendered entirely in black and grey with soft shading and fine detail across the medallion and tree.

Realism Geometric Back Sun Face Tree Horse Wheel Cloud

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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

Mind the flour, love, it gets in the teeth. Sit where the oven breathes. No, closer. My hearing has gone to the ash and the rest of me follows it.

Keep reading

Before there was a bakery on this corner, there was a sun that had lost its face. A potter in Halvey carved it onto the lid of the parish well, a round, patient face with its eyes half shut, and the weather wore it down a little every winter until only the brows were left. The women of the valley would not light their ovens until somebody looked at that sun properly. So a girl called Orla Tench climbed the bell-rope with a pot of lamp-black and a boar's-hair brush, and she drew the face back on, line by line, while the bread went cold in the baskets below.

The sun was pleased, or so the story goes. It took the two grey horses that pulled the wheel across the sky and told them to go slow for her. One horse drew the dawn, the other drew the dusk, and between them the great wheel turned over the valley with its spokes catching the light. Under it stood the old tree whose roots went down past the well, past the cellar, past the oldest bread anyone had ever baked, and every loaf that rose in this street drank a little of that root water before it went in the oven.

So here is what you do, when the sky goes grey over the shutters. Take the first loaf from the tray before anyone asks you to. Hold it up to the window. If the crust has split in the shape of a face, you have been paid in full, and you may go home and sleep until the afternoon. Mind the hot tin, now. There, you have it. Look at the sun coming up behind the wheel. It has been waiting for you.