Black tribal tattoo with a sun face on a shirtless man's chest, continuing over the shoulder and down the upper arm and forearm in a Polynesian-inspired blackwork style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Tribal sun chest and full arm sleeve

Blackwork · Chest · Black and grey · Photo

A shirtless man, cropped below the neck and above the waistband, shows a large black tribal tattoo covering his chest, shoulder and arm. The chest piece centres on a sun face surrounded by rays, bands and lightning-like zigzags, while the arm is filled with spirals, chevrons and geometric panels. The image has a warm sepia tone, and the solid black linework is bold and dense, with the tattoo framed against a dark background.

Blackwork Chest Shoulder Upper arm Forearm Spiral Chevron Zigzag Band Ray Sleeve Chest piece

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The sundial had been bolted to the wall of the kitchen garden since before the war, and nobody in Harrow Lane could say who had cut its face. Ada Penhale knew only that the sun on it had a mouth, and that the zigzags running out from its rays made the bees go mad in July. She swept the flagstones beneath it every Sunday with a yard broom, the way her mother had, and talked to the stone while she worked.

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The trouble began when the council wanted the wall for a bypass slip road. A young surveyor called Owen Bright came with a clipboard and a tape measure that snapped back at him every time he let go. He wanted the dial taken down. Ada made him tea in the potting shed and told him the sun had never once been wrong about the hour, only about the weather, and that was a fair bargain for any neighbour.

He measured the wall again on the Friday. That evening he came back with a tin of brown paint and a brush borrowed from his nan, and spent until dark tracing the zigzags onto the bricks beside the dial, shifting each line by a finger's width until the new rays met the old ones at the stone's edge. When the revised plans arrived, the slip road bent around the garden wall like a stream around a stone.

Ada never mentioned it to him. In September she left a jar of runner beans on his car bonnet, and the sun above the kitchen door kept its open mouth the way it always had, catching the first light and throwing it back over the lettuces.