Black linework tattoo of a smiling sun with a face and sunburst rays on the side of a person's ribs, above the waistband of light blue jeans.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Sun with face tattoo on the side ribs

Traditional · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A black linework tattoo of a sun with a face, its eyes and mouth drawn in a playful expression, surrounded by pointed rays. The lines are bold and even with simple solid fill and no visible shading, and the ink is entirely black and grey. The photo is taken from behind and to the side, showing the tattoo on bare skin above the waistband of light blue jeans, with a kitchen floor and cabinets in the background.

Traditional Ribs Sun Sunburst Ray

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

At ten past three the ward goes quiet in the particular way it only does after midnight, when the monitors keep their own time and the corridor lights hum at a pitch you stop hearing by the second week. Bed nine had been asking for the sun since teatime. Not the real one, which was off somewhere being useless, but the one Ellis had drawn on the back of a menu with a blue biro and a lot of ambition.

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It was a good sun. Rays like a hedgehog that had been in a fight, a round face squashed into the middle, one eye shut tight and the mouth curled up at one corner as though it had just got away with something. Ellis wouldn't let the menu out of his fist. His mum had gone home at eleven to feed the cat and sleep for a bit, the way parents do when they've been awake for two days, and she'd left him with me and a promise to be back by six.

'Why's it winking?' I asked, because I was tired and it seemed like the question to ask. 'Because it knows where the biscuits are,' he said, and I laughed too loudly for the hour, and the healthcare assistant at the desk looked up over her glasses. 'Can you do one for you?' Ellis said. 'So you don't get tired.' I said I'd try. He pushed the pen across the blanket table with the sort of seriousness only a seven-year-old can manage at three in the morning.

So I drew one on the back of my hand, badly, rays going everywhere, and held it up to his good eye. He squinted at it, decided I'd done the wink wrong, and took the pen back to fix it. By the time the blinds went grey at six, my hand had a sun on it with two winks, and Ellis was asleep with the menu under his cheek, and the day shift was already clattering in with its trolleys and its coffee. I didn't wash it off.