Black tribal-style sun design with a stylised face, swirls and triangular rays, shown as a drawing with no body placement.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Tribal sun face design

Blackwork · Black and grey · Flash

A solid black tribal-style design of a sun with a stylised face, featuring narrowed eyes, a striped open mouth and a ring of triangular rays. The surrounding area is filled with spirals, curved bands and angular notches, all in bold black linework on a white background. The composition is a flat, centred circle with no shading or colour.

Blackwork Sun Face Tribal Spiral Triangle Swirl

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit down on the wall, you, and mind the wasps, they're drunk on the windfalls. My grandfather used to say the sun was a face that got tired of looking at the same orchard. Every August it leaned down over the hedge to see whether the Discovery apples were blushing yet, and every August it stayed a little too long.

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That year, the summer after the big drought, the sun came so low the grass went white at the edges. Old Tobias Venn, who kept the trees at Hollins Farm, went out with his pruning saw to cut back the wild branches that had started curling like fiddleheads, and found the sun sitting in the lowest bough of the oldest tree, its rays spread out like the spokes of a broken umbrella. Its eyes were narrowed against the glare of its own light. It was squinting at the fruit the way a man squints at a bill.

"Give me one more week," the sun said. "Just one more, so the pips go black."

Tobias was a cautious man. He said he would give the sun the bitter crab apple from the corner tree, the one nobody could eat, if the sun would let the late rain come. The sun laughed, which made the lawn ripple like water, and took the crab apple, and the spirals on its cheek began to turn the other way.

Come September the rain came, cold and sideways. The sun went back up the sky, but the apples that had hung in its light all summer were sweeter than any that year, and on the bark of that oldest tree a ring of little triangle marks stayed behind, the exact shape of the rays, still there when Tobias died. Go on, eat your windfall. It only tastes of sugar because the sun owed us something.