Black and grey sun tattoo with a face, ornamental rays and hanging chains, sitting on the thigh.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Sun with face and hanging chains on thigh

Blackwork · Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

A large sun with a stylised human face sits at the centre, with long flame-like rays, pointed spokes and ornamental scrollwork. Fine outlines and dotwork shading give the design depth, and strings of beads with teardrop drops hang from the lower rays. The tattoo is shown in black ink and grey tones, centred on the skin of the upper leg.

Blackwork Dotwork Thigh Sun Face Ray Chain Bead Tassel Ornament Celestial

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The sun on the wheelhouse of the Marigold had lost its cheeks again, the rouge flaking off in the salt like pastry left out in the rain, and my father would not let the boat leave Newlyn until I had mixed fresh red from the tin in the paint locker. I was eleven and proud of the brush. He held the lantern while I worked and told me that a sun with a sad face sends the herring off to find warmer water.

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The fleet was nine boats that year. Each one had a sun somewhere on its hull, and our bosun Ruth had strung the davit lines with glass beads and little brass drops that clicked whenever the swell lifted us, so the men could hear the boat before they saw it in fog. Nobody admitted to believing in any of it. Still, when the mist came down off the Lizard that October and the compass spun like a dropped coin, it was the wheelhouse sun I stared at, its spokes pointing the way they always pointed, and I called the heading through the hatch.

We came home through that murk by following the beads, one clink after another, until the harbour wall rose grey ahead and we ran alongside with the nets half full and nobody speaking. Ruth lifted me down onto the quay and looked at my painted cheeks, now smudged by spray. She said I had given the sun a better face than the man who first painted it, and that she would tell the other skippers so.

That night I climbed back up with the rouge tin and touched the cheeks again in the lamplight, while the beads above the door rang softly in the wind and the sun looked out over the dark water as if it had been waiting for us.