Close photograph of a bold tribal-style sun tattoo on skin, with a black swirling centre and red, orange and yellow rays.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Tribal sun tattoo in red and orange

Colour · Photo

A tribal-style sun sits at the centre of the frame, with a black spiral forming its core and flame-like rays extending outwards. The bold black outlines are filled with red, orange and yellow shading that gives the rays a sense of depth. The tattoo fills most of the image against plain skin, which is cropped tightly around it.

Sun Swirl Ray Flame

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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

Sit in close, the wind up here has teeth, and I'll not shout over the crows. See that tower with no roof? Three hundred winters back, the lord of Carrick Holt kept the sun locked under its floor in a bronze bowl, because his people had grown tired of the dark and he had grown tired of their asking.

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His daughter Ysolde was the only one who would go down the stair to tend it. Each dusk she carried a ladle of cold well water and poured it along the coil of the thing, so its arms would not scorch the granary. The sun curled in her hands like a cat, all red and gold and smoke. When the water touched it, it hissed, and she hummed until the hiss softened into a purr.

One autumn the lord grew greedy. He wanted the sun blazing on his battlements, so he sent men with iron hooks to drag the bowl up into daylight. Ysolde stood in the doorway with her ladle and said nothing. She only tipped the water over her own shoulders and walked out into the light beside it. The sun rose from the bowl, saw her, and wrapped its flames around her like a cloak.

The lord's men found only a black spiral burnt into the flagstones and a castle gone cold to the bone. If you climb the stair at dusk, you'll find the bowl full of rainwater and a ladle hung beside it, and you'll feel warmth on your back before you see any light. Mind you hang the ladle back where you found it.