Enlarged with AI from a smaller original
Tribal sun face design
Blackwork · Black and grey · Flash
A bold black and white tribal design shows a stylised face with symmetrical eyes, a central marking and a wide mouth, set inside a circle. Heavy solid black shapes are balanced by white negative space, with curled and angular patterns filling the edges. The composition is centred and flat, with no shading and no body part visible.
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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction
Sit down before the wind takes your hat, you'll want the bench out of it. You've been staring at that sun over Pruett's door like it owes you money. Everybody does. Old Tobiah Crane cut that face in 1921, the year the herring came in so thick the nets split on the quay.
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He worked with pitch and a sharpened chisel, nothing fancy. Black where the wood was solid, bare white where he left it for the light to get through. His wife said the eyes were too big, and he said a sun has to see a long way. Those zigzags on the left are rays, or teeth, depending on whether you've been out in February. The curls round the rim he cut last, after the men had started ribbing him about his tidy little sun.
The winter after, the Mary Ellen went out with six aboard and came back in fog so thick you couldn't see your own bow. Tobiah stood on the wall all night with a lantern. He didn't wave it. He hung it behind the carving so the light came through the open eyes and the mouth, and the boat steered for that white in the black until the keel grated on the slip. Every child in this town learns that a sun has to be seen from the outside before you can trust it.
So when you walk past, look at the eyes, love. They're not closed. They're just waiting for the boats.
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