Black ink sun with flame-like rays and a shaded centre, tattooed on the stomach above white shorts.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Sun tattoo on the stomach

Other · Black and grey · Photo

A black ink sun sits on a bare midriff, with a solid circular centre surrounded by a ring of tapering, flame-like rays. The tattoo is rendered in black with soft grey shading inside the disc, and the design is centred on the frame. A hand rests against the skin beside it, and a purple top and white shorts are visible.

Other Sun Ray Flame 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

The sun over the dining room door has been bleeding damp through its primrose paint since Easter, and Mrs Ardle wants it gone before the Whitsun lodgers arrive. You climb the stepladder with a tin of emulsion and a brush that smells of turps, and beneath the first coat you find a sun nobody meant to hide: a dark disc with rays that lick outward like candle flames, drawn in a hand steadier than yours.

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Mrs Ardle says it belonged to the last painter, a man called Tobias Quayle who slept in room four for one wet August and drew suns on every wall he could reach. He paid his bill in sketches, and the guests liked them well enough. The grey shading inside the disc is still soft, as though someone rubbed it with a thumb to make it look warm, and you find yourself standing on the ladder longer than the job needs, wondering what he was running from.

On the fourth evening a boy from room four knocks to ask whether the sun can stay. He has been sitting under it at breakfast and says it is the only thing in the house that doesn't look like it is waiting for the tide to take it. You tell him the paint is nearly dry. He says that isn't what he asked.

You leave the sun. You paint the rest of the room the colour of weak tea, and the rays still show faintly at the edges like a sunrise seen through a net curtain. Every morning after, the first light through the window lands square on the old black disc and turns it, for a minute, into the only thing in Skelling Bay that is fully awake.