Sun Tattoo Meaning

Vitality, life, power, and the force that banishes all darkness.

Every culture that ever existed has worshipped the sun, and almost none agreed on what it was — a god sailing a boat, a goddess hiding in a cave, a warrior who demands blood, an eye that sees everything. What they shared was the recognition that the sun is the source: of life, of time, of sight, of the authority that kings borrowed by calling themselves its children. And they shared one anxiety — that each night it dies, and each morning it must be born again, and that this return is the most important and least guaranteed event in the world.

To the Egyptians the sun was a god on a journey. Ra sailed across the sky each day in his solar barque, and each night he descended into the underworld, where he had to pass through twelve hours of darkness and fight the chaos-serpent Apep, who tried to swallow him before dawn. Every sunrise was therefore a victory, a rebirth — Ra emerging young again as the scarab Khepri, 'he who comes into being.'

The pharaoh ruled as the son of Ra, his earthly authority a loan from the sun. For a brief, radical period the pharaoh Akhenaten swept the other gods aside and worshipped only the Aten, the visible disk of the sun, its rays ending in little hands offering life. The Egyptian sun was never simply light — it was the daily proof that order can defeat chaos, but only by making the journey through the dark every single night.

Related symbols