Black tribal tattoo design sheet showing a sun-face motif, two bands with swirling patterns, and a small lizard-like figure, with red arrows marking two areas.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Tribal sun and band designs

Black and grey · Flash

A stacked black ink design sheet of tribal motifs. The top piece is a circular sun-like face with radiating rays, followed by symmetrical swirling bands and a round panel of interlocking curls, with a small lizard-like figure at the bottom. The linework is bold and solid with no shading, and the image is black and white with two red arrows added as annotations.

Tribal Sun Face Spiral Lizard Pattern Band

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lintel had split in the winter frost, and Marta Quint said she would not hang a new door under a bare beam while the sun was still looking in at her. So she carried an ash plank down to the workshop behind the bakery and began on the sun. She cut the face first: two eyes like closed seeds, a nose that was only a bar of shadow, and a mouth held shut by a single groove she left deep enough to catch dust.

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The rays took the whole of February. Each one she cut with the gouge turned inward, so every spoke ended in a little hook, and the hooks seemed to pass the chisel back to her the way a rope passes a knot along a line. Her neighbour Ruben, who mended nets and had opinions about everything, came by with bread and asked why the sun needed so many arms. She told him the sun had been reaching for things for a long time and wanted the arms to show it.

Below the face she carved the bands, two mirrored swirls that folded back on themselves like a wave drawing breath, then a round panel of curls she worked until her thumbs went white. At the foot of the plank she left a space the size of a palm. Ruben asked what would go there. She said a lizard, because something small ought to be warming itself on the step.

In April she hung the door. The first morning, light came through the fanlight and laid the sun's rays across the flagstones, and on the bottom step a grey gecko sat in the exact warm bar of it, as if it had been invited. Marta left it there. The next morning it was still there, so she set the bread down beside it.