Black and grey blackwork sun tattoo with a human face and long rays, placed centrally on a person's upper back.

Sun with face tattoo on upper back

Blackwork · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A large sun with a face at its centre is surrounded by long pointed rays, with a larger star-like point extending upward, downward and to each side. Bold solid black linework is combined with stippled dotwork shading around the rays, and the face is drawn with fine detail. The black and white photograph shows the upper back of a person wearing a white lace top, with the tattoo as the clear focus.

Blackwork Dotwork Back Sun Face Ray Star Celestial

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Every spring the frost came back to the Halloway kitchen garden, and every spring Old Maud went out before dawn with a pail of ash to dust the beds. This year she had no ash left, only a lamp with a cracked chimney and a son who would not get up.

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Her neighbour's boy had told her the sun had gone sour. Not gone out, he said, just sour, hanging over the hills with its face turned away like a cat shut in the coal shed. The beans had stopped climbing. The bees stayed in their skeps. Maud did not believe in much, but she believed in what she could see, and every morning she could see the sun looking at her sideways over the wall, pale and tired.

So she walked up the long lane to the crooked hill where the four stone pillars stood, the ones her grandmother called the compass stones, and she sat down among them and asked the sun plainly what it wanted. It took a while. Then the rays, long as a wheelbarrow handle, slid out of the grass and pointed at her gate, and the face in the middle opened its eyes.

"Water the gooseberries," it said, "and stop sweeping my shadow off the path."

Maud did not understand, but she went home and did both. Next morning the sun rose full and warm over the wall, and the beans climbed as if nothing had happened. Her son came out with his boots unlaced and asked why the garden smelt of rain when it had not rained. She told him the sun had asked for a little respect, and he laughed, and she let him.