Black ink tattoo of a sun with a human face, a crescent moon and swirling stars, placed on the upper back.

Sun face with crescent moon and stars on upper back

Back · Black and grey · Photo

A black ink tattoo of a sun with a face in its centre sits on the upper back, with rays that extend outwards. A crescent moon and small stars are woven among curling swirls on the left side of the design. The linework is dark and even, with some shading in the rays and the moon, and the photograph is taken straight on against plain skin.

Back Sun Moon Star Face Swirl Celestial

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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

Brother Aldous had been told the sundial on the south wall was wrong by a full quarter hour, and he had spent three mornings proving the prior right. Now, on the fourth, he sat on the cold step with a stub of charcoal and a folded sheet of vellum, trying to draw the face the sun wore at seven o'clock. It never looked the same twice. The rays were too many and the cheeks too round, and the moon kept slipping in at the edge of the page like a guest who had come to the wrong feast.

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Behind him the bell for Prime rang out over the wet fields. Brother Aldous did not get up. He had found, in the back of the old almanac in the scriptorium, a drawing of the same thing made by a brother long dead, a sun with a grave face and a crescent moon tucked under its arm, the stars scattered round them like crumbs of salt. Under it someone had written, in faded brown ink, that the sun is the eye of God, the moon is the eye of the Church, and when they look at one another the sundial is true.

He had thought it nonsense. Now he laid the vellum on his knee and drew the stars one by one, each with its small curling tail, until the page was crowded with them. When he finally looked up, the shadow of the gnomon had crept across the stone and sat exactly on the line marked for the hour. The prior's clock was wrong after all. Brother Aldous pulled his hood against the wind and went in to tell him so.