Black and grey tribal sun with a face and bands of spiral and triangle patterns covering a person's upper arm and shoulder.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Sun face tribal upper arm tattoo

Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A large tattoo of a sun with a face and long rays covers the upper arm and shoulder, framed by a band of triangles and a scalloped outer ring. Below the sun, bold tribal bands of swirls, spirals and a wheel-like motif wrap around the arm. The linework is solid and the shading is soft and greyed, with the tattoo set against warm skin and a white sleeveless top.

Upper arm Shoulder Sun Tribal pattern Spiral Swirl Triangle Wheel Wave

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The sun had been caught on the Kessar ridge for three days, hanging like a brass coin on a thread, and nobody in Olvane could bake bread under a light that never moved. My grandmother sent me up the pass with a goat, a sack of salt and strict instructions not to speak to anything with a face.

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The pass was grey scree and wind that tasted of iron. Halfway up I found the shepherd Tomas on a boulder, stitching a sandal with a bone awl. He did not look surprised. "It came down last winter," he said, nodding at a hollow where the stones were scorched black in rings, like the spokes of a cartwheel. "Got tired of being stared at from so far off."

In the hollow lay a face of hammered gold no bigger than a dinner plate, its rays bent and knotted like bramble, its mouth wide in a grin with the tongue lolling out. It looked up at me the way a dog looks when it has stolen a pie. "Salt," it said, in a voice like a cart on gravel. "I want the salt."

I tipped the sack onto the stones in a spiral, the way my grandmother taught me to lay out a hearth, and the sun licked the grains up one by one, sighing with each. When the last crystal was gone it lifted itself off the rock and rolled upward into the sky, wheel-fashion, scattering light across the scree. Tomas went back to his awl. "It owes you a favour now," he said. "They always pay in daylight." Below, Olvane's rooftops began to shine, and my goat, for the first time since spring, cast a shadow.