Black and grey blackwork tattoo of a sun with eight patterned rays and three outlined stars on a person's upper back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Sun with rays and three stars on upper back

Blackwork · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A sun with a solid circular centre and eight rays, each filled with bold geometric patterns, sits in the centre of the upper back. Three outlined five-point stars surround it, one above each side and one below. The work uses heavy black linework and solid black fills with grey-toned shading on the skin, and the design is arranged symmetrically across the shoulder blades.

Blackwork Geometric Back Sun Ray Star Sunburst Symmetry

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Teodora had always thought the sun was a plain thing, a round coin you could steer by. Her grandfather Ignacio disagreed, and he proved it by rapping the bamboo outrigger with his knuckle. "Count the rays," he said. "Eight of them. Each one is a wind, and you must know every wind by name before you dare cross open water."

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They had left the reef at Tarak before the sun was properly up, and by midday the shore was only a grey line behind them. Ignacio named the three stars the way other people name cousins. The first hung over the bow, the second off the quarter, and the third sat so low it seemed to float on the water. "That one is the lamp in the fishing village," he said. "Keep it on your left hand and the sun on your right, and the sea will mind its own business."

The fog came in the late afternoon, thick and milky, and the sun vanished as if someone had pulled a cloth over it. Teodora gripped the tiller and tried to hold the rays in her head, but they blurred together. She recited the winds in the dark of her own eyelids, one after another, until she reached the eighth, the north-easterly her grandfather had always called the liar. "It lies only in the dry months," he had told her once, and she had not asked him what he meant.

She steered by the sound of the swell and the sting of the spray on her left cheek. When the fog thinned at dawn, the lamp star was still there, low and steady, and the sun was rising through the cloud with its rays spread out like a hand. Teodora took her knife to the mast and cut eight small notches around its crown, one for each wind she had named aloud, and then she turned the bow towards home.