Black traditional-style tattoo of a sun with a face and long rays, placed on the chest beside a grey top.

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Sun with face tattoo on skin

Traditional · Chest · Black and grey · Photo

A black ink tattoo of a sun with a stylised face and long rays, alternating straight and wavy, surrounds a central circle. Bold outlines and solid black fill with little shading give it a graphic, flat look. The tattoo sits in a close crop of bare skin, with grey fabric at the lower right and hair at the left edge.

Traditional Chest Sun Face Ray

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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

Uncle Derek gave me the sign-writing brushes the winter the Gannet's Pride limped home with her wheelhouse stove in and nobody willing to say why. He wanted the sun on her bow repainted before the lifeboat crew came round for their Sunday inspection. I had lettered hulls before, but never a face.

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The old sun had grinned at everyone who ever came into Port Tennant with a catch or a grievance, its eyes two dabs of white and its mouth a wry little crescent. I could not get the mouth right. Every attempt came out smug or sorrowful. Derek stood on the quay with his pipe unlit and watched me try four times, then said a face only needs to look like it has seen the weather, which was no help at all.

So I did the rays the way the old man had, straight spears alternating with wavy ones, like heat coming off a road. The straight ones I drew with a rule and a steady hand. The wavy ones I did freehand, sitting on an upturned crab pot with the wind trying to take the brush. By dusk the black was dry and the sun looked out over the harbour mouth as if it were counting boats back in.

The Gannet's Pride came in on the tide that night, late and low, and her skipper climbed down the ladder, looked at the new sun for a long moment, and laughed. "Still smiling," he said. "Good. Somebody on this coast should be." I never found out what had happened out past the breakwater, and I stopped asking. But I kept the brushes, and every spring I touch up that sun before anyone else thinks to look at it.