Black and grey tattoo of a bicycle chain curving into a heart shape, with a sprocket on the left, on a area of pale skin.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Bicycle chain heart with sprocket

Other · Black and grey · Photo

A bicycle chain loops around to form a heart shape, with a detailed sprocket sitting at the upper left of the design. The chain links and sprocket teeth are outlined in dark ink and shaded with grey to give them depth, and the skin around the design is pale and plain. The composition is a single, centred design on a close crop with a dark background.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Brother Anselm kept the abbey's three bicycles the way other men kept dogs, with more affection than sense. The old Raleigh had been given to us by a widow from Hexham, and its chain had stretched so far that it rattled like a rosary dropped on flagstones. Every Thursday after Vespers I oiled it in the cellar by lamplight, and every Thursday Brother Ambrose asked me whether the Lord had any use for a chain at all.

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I told him the Lord had made the wheel, and the wheel needed something to turn it. He said that was a theologian's argument and I was a mechanic, and we left it there, as we always did. But that autumn the chain snapped on the hill road below the gatehouse, and I spent two days in the rain fitting a new link with a tool that had belonged to my father. When I finally rode back up, the sprocket was spitting grease and I was soaked to the skin, and I found Ambrose waiting at the gate with a sack of bread for the village.

He took one look at my hands and laughed for the first time in a year. Then he pulled a crumpled drawing from his sleeve, a heart made from the very chain I had been cursing, looped round and joined at the top where the sprocket sat like a small sun. "Brother Hal in the infirmary drew this for me," he said. "He thinks we should carve it over the cellar door." I asked him what it meant. He shrugged. "That a thing that goes round forever is still a thing that needs mending."