Three views of a black and grey biomechanical tattoo on a man's forearm, showing gears, pipes and metal panels that appear to peel back from the skin.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Biomechanical forearm tattoo in three views

Realism · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

Three photographs of the same forearm, with palms turned up, show a biomechanical design of gears, pipes, valves and riveted metal panels. The panels appear to lift away from the skin, giving a three-dimensional effect. The work uses fine greyscale shading and highlights on a black background, with no colour ink.

Realism Forearm Biomechanical Gear Pipe Mechanical

Find an artist for this

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

The metalwork room at Foxhill Secondary was a skip by the time our year came back for the reunion, but Dennis Wragg had rescued the back panel of the old lathe before the builders arrived. He turned up at the Crown with it under his arm, a sheet of riveted grey steel no bigger than a tea tray, and set it on our table between the crisps and the spilt lager. "Look at the bolts," he said. "Every one of them Mr Pyle's."

Keep reading

Mr Pyle had taught us to read a drawing before we were allowed to touch a file. He would stand at the bench with his sleeves rolled up and swing a panel open on its hinge to show us what sat behind it: a gearbox, a tangle of copper pipe, a valve wheel worn bright by thirty years of hands. "Machines keep their secrets behind lids," he used to say. "Good engineers know where the lids are."

Dennis ran his thumb along a row of rivets and I found myself counting them, the way we had counted the pulleys on the wall chart. Somebody asked whether it was real. He said it was the only thing from that room that had never been scrapped, and then he lifted the sheet a fraction off the table. The light from the bar slid into the gap underneath, and for a second the whole tangle of wheels and pipes seemed to shift, as if it had been waiting for someone to notice.

Mr Pyle had died in March. Nobody mentioned it. I looked at the strip of shadow beneath the panel and thought of the lid he always told us to find. Dennis slid it back down flat. "He'd have wanted it on a wall," he said, "not in my loft." I went home that night and found, at the back of my kitchen drawer, the spanner he had given me for passing my practical, still stamped with the school's initials.