Black tribal sun tattoo with spiral centre and spiky rays, placed between the shoulder blades on a person's upper back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Tribal sun tattoo on upper back

Back · Black and grey · Photo

A small black tribal sun sits centred between the shoulder blades, with a spiral at its core and pointed rays radiating outward. The linework is bold and solid with no visible shading, and the ink is entirely black against the skin. The subject is photographed from behind against a dark background, wearing a black camisole with thin straps and a black ribbon choker, with the head cropped out of frame.

Back Sun Spiral Ray

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The sun was stolen from the village of Hallow Reach on the morning of the wedding, and nobody noticed until the bride asked for the lamps to be lit. Her name was Ebba Dunmore and she was marrying the miller's son, a quiet man who kept his hands in flour and his thoughts in the granary. The church was cold. The candles would not take. Old Mother Sorrel, who had buried two husbands and never once wept at either, walked out to the stone wall at the edge of the common and found the sun's hook-marks scratched into the lichen, as though something had been lifted off the hill like a bucket from a well.

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She followed the marks through the bracken to the bog, where a heron stood on one leg beside a black pool. The sun was there, folded small, a knot of light tangled in the reeds. It had been taken by the bog-wife, who wanted a wedding of her own and had no sun to make it bright. Sorrel did not argue. She sat on a tussock, took out her bone needle and her ink of soot and oak gall, and began to draw the sun back onto the bog-wife's shoulder, ray by ray, spiral by spiral, so that whatever light the woman kept would stay on her skin and not in the water.

The bog-wife cried out at the sting of it and let the sun go. It rose over Hallow Reach so fast the frost ran off the church roof in rivers. Ebba married her miller in full light, and the bog-wife, who was not cruel only lonely, kept her mark for ever, a small black sun between the shoulders that no one in the village could see except when she turned away to walk home.