Colour tattoo of a yellow outlined sun with a purple wash and swirling vine linework on the side of the torso.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Yellow sun with purple wash

Ribs · Colour · Photo

A yellow outlined sun with wavy rays sits at the centre, with a mottled pink and purple centre. A soft purple wash spreads behind the rays, and fine purple swirls and tendrils extend outwards from the lower and upper edges. The tattoo is shown up close on smooth skin with even lighting.

Ribs Sun Ray Swirl Vine Wash

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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 yourself down by the range, the kettle's only just gone off and the damp hasn't got into the good chair yet. You'll want the story of the sun over the back bedroom, the one the Pardoe girl painted on the wall when the house still took in summer visitors. She was seventeen, had more paint on her fingers than sense in her head, and the landlady had threatened to turn her out on the Monday.

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What she painted was a sun with a face like a wet copper coin, its rays all wavy like the heat coming off the sands at Cleethorpes. The yellow was cheap ochre from the ironmonger on Marine Road, and when that ran out she mixed a purple from the bruise-coloured dye the fishermen used on their nets. She dabbed it behind the rays like a wash, and the purple bled into the plaster until the whole wall looked as if a storm had come through and left its colour behind. Then she took a fine brush and drew little curling tendrils creeping out from the top and bottom edges, the way bindweed comes up through a gate.

The lodgers loved it. A bald man from Leeds paid his bill a week early just so he could sleep under it. But the landlady's husband came up one morning with a bucket and a stiff brush, meaning to scrub it off, and found the girl sitting cross-legged on the floor, fast asleep, with a cold cup of tea by her knee. He stood there a long while with the water dripping off his boots. Then he went back down without a word and told the lodgers the wall was damp, which it was, and nobody ever washed it.

The sun is still there, you know. Put your hand flat on that patch by the window and you'll feel it warm, though it's only lime and old plaster. Some things get kept because someone was too tired to be cruel.