Solid black tribal tattoo with a sun face on the chest, extending over the shoulder and down the arm to the wrist, shown on a shirtless man.

Tribal sun chest piece and arm sleeve

Blackwork · Chest · Black and grey · Photo

The design combines a sun with a carved-looking face at the centre of the chest with radiating rays and bands of geometric tribal patterns. It continues over the shoulder and down the upper arm and forearm, with spirals, chevrons and key-like motifs in bold black linework. The image is a close, well-lit crop of the torso and arm against a plain black background, with the ink appearing solid black and grey on the skin.

Blackwork Chest Shoulder Upper arm Forearm Sun Tribal pattern Spiral Chevron Geometric pattern Sleeve Chest piece

Find an artist for this

Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nineteen days out from Valparaíso, with the Marisol rolling under a sky the colour of pewter, Ada Pell found the cook scraping a pattern into the flour bin lid with a bent spoon. He was drawing a sun, a round face with its tongue out, rays spiking in every direction like the spokes of a cart wheel. "My grandmother's people said the sun needs reminding it has a face," he said, not looking up. "Otherwise it forgets to come back."

Keep reading

Ada took the spoon from him and began filling the gaps between the rays with spirals, the way he showed her: start at the centre, never lift the blade, let the curl tighten until it closes like a fist. Chevrons came next, then the stepped hooks the old carpenter had carved into the mast cap before his heart gave out off Cape Horn. Each band marked a week. By the time they crossed the doldrums the lid was crowded with black, and the flour had gone grey from all the scraping.

On the twenty-seventh night the wind dropped to nothing and the sails hung like wet washing. The cook sat on the hatch with his shirt open and his sleeve pushed back, and Ada saw for the first time that the same pattern ran from his shoulder to his wrist, chevrons biting the skin in neat rows. "Every man who lives through the calms gets one band," he said. "I got my sleeve off the Horn. You'll have to wait for yours."

At dawn the sun rose straight out of the water and laid its light across the flour lid. Ada counted the rays, twelve of them, and then ran her thumb through the flour until the thirteenth was gone. "Now it'll have to come back and find it," she said, and the cook laughed so hard he had to hold on to the rail.