Back of a woman with a grey and brown sun tattoo on the upper back, its wavy rays surrounded by swirling linework.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Sun with swirling tendrils on upper back

Back · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows a sun with a solid central disc and long wavy rays, surrounded by curling tendril-like swirls drawn in thin outline. The rays and disc are shaded in grey and brown tones, while the swirls are finer, single-line strokes. The subject is photographed from behind, centred on the upper back, with the black straps of a vest top framing the design.

Back Sun Ray Swirl Tendril Scrollwork

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The sun had been sinking a little further into the sea each evening since the equinox, and nobody on Skerra Head thought to mention it until the gulls stopped calling at dusk. Edda Brannock had kept the light for forty years, winding the clockwork at four and cursing the damp at five. She did not know what to make of the sun hanging low over the water like a wet cord, its long rays trailing and slack.

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It was her grandson Tam, nine and nosy as a crab, who found the knot. He came up the cliff path at low water with a fistful of bladder wrack and a sea-green twist of weed wound round his wrist. Where the weed had pulled loose from the rocks, a copper glint showed through, round and warm as a penny. "It's caught," he said. "The sun's gone and tangled itself in the wrack under the tide, and it can't get free."

They took the coble out at slack water with a boathook, a bread knife and a flask of tea. The sun lay just below the surface, its rays snarled in kelp that curled and doubled back on itself like fiddlehead ferns. Edda worked at it patiently, one tendril at a time, the way she unpicked a stubborn jumper. When the last loop gave, the disc rose through the water, shaking off brine, and the rays unfurled with a sound like sails filling.

It did not thank them. It climbed the sky slowly, looking, Edda thought, a little embarrassed, and warmed the rocks before it had quite got its breath back. That night she wound the clockwork at four as usual, then sat with the lamp unlit and waited. Tam asked why. "Somebody has to keep the sun company," she said, "or it'll forget the way down again." She struck the match herself, and the beam swept the water like a long, patient finger.