Black linework sun with dotted hanging chains and drop motifs tattooed on the side of the ribs, with a grey top lifted above it.

Sun with dotted hanging chain on ribs

Dotwork · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A black linework sun with a round centre, eye-like motifs and long wavy rays sits on the side of the ribs. Fine dotted chains with small drops hang from the lower rays, forming a scalloped border beneath the sun. The design is in solid black ink on a pale skin tone, with a plain background of grey fabric and a light wall.

Dotwork Geometric Ribs Sun Ray Chain Drop Dot Linework Mandala

Find an artist for this

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

Sit yourselves down, and mind the drip, for that's the sound you'll hear all the way down the Gwyn shaft, and old Iorwerth swore it was the sun talking to itself. Forty fathoms under Tregarth Hill there's no daylight, so the men hung a tin sun on the cage gate to remind them what they'd left up top. Hammered out of a biscuit tin, Mam always said, with rays bent wide as a kestrel's wing and two round eyes punched in the middle, one half shut and one wide open, the way a man looks at weather.

Keep reading

Every shift the water came through the roof in fine strings, and the lads caught those drops on wire and hung them from the rays, a little dotted chain for every one that fell. By the spring there were chains swinging the whole way round, scalloped like a lady's collar, and the foreman grumbled that the sun was getting heavy. Iorwerth said it was getting full.

Then in the wet March the roof came down at the low level, and eleven men were left on the far side of the fall with their lamps going out one by one. They tapped on the iron pipe with a spanner, the old code, and the men at the gate heard it answer faint and far off, a tap for every drop that fell from the wire. Iorwerth stood with his palm flat on the tin sun and counted back, and nobody asked him to stop.

They brought out nine. Nobody ever settled what the sun had been counting, but the chains dried by the summer and the open eye never closed again. When I was a boy I'd touch the cold tin for luck before my shift, same as the rest of them. Mind the drip now. That's only the water keeping count.