Black and grey sun tattoo with a face, radiating rays and dotted chains hanging below, placed centrally on the chest.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Sun with face on chest

Traditional · Chest · Black and grey · Photo

A large sun with a human face sits at the centre of the torso, its rays drawn in bold black linework. Dotted chains hang beneath it, ending in small pendant shapes, and fine shading adds depth to the rays and face. The image is in black and grey, framed by an open plaid shirt on either side.

Traditional Dotwork Chest Sun Ray Dotted chain Pendant Torso

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dad painted the sun on the wheelhouse door the spring the locks froze, and I thought it was a joke until I saw how carefully he'd done the rays, each one drawn out like a child's firework. Under the brass plate he hung three chains of small black beads that clacked whenever we went through a bridge hole. He said the beads were for the rain we wouldn't get. Mum said they were for the cost of the paint.

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We worked the Constance Ada down the Oxford Canal that summer with a load of coal for a pub in Banbury. I steered at night because Dad's knee would not bend for the tiller after Napton. The sun face watched me from the door with half shut eyes, like someone trying to stay awake through a long sermon. I talked to it. It never answered, which I counted in its favour.

On the last night before the sale, I found Dad on the towpath with a tin of white gloss and a brush. He meant to paint over the face and keep the rays, he said, because nobody buys a boat with a stranger's face on it. I asked whose face it was. He said his mother's, copied from a photograph of her squinting into a Cornish sun, and that he had never got the mouth right. I took the brush and did the mouth myself, badly, and the face came out looking surprised, which suited it.

Next morning the new owner, a schoolteacher from Leamington with a spaniel called Pilot, ran her thumb over the beads and asked what they were for. I said rain. She laughed and said she would keep them. I stood on the bank as the boat pulled away, the chains swinging slow and dark, the surprised face still turned up towards the sky.