Black and grey biomechanical full sleeve tattoo on an upper arm and forearm, showing metal plates, gears, chains and a shield emblem, shown in three photographs.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Biomechanical full sleeve with gears and chains

Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A full sleeve tattoo of armoured metal plates, gears, chains and pipes, with a shield-shaped emblem at the centre of the upper arm. The linework is bold and the shading is smooth and three-dimensional, with highlights on the raised plates and deep shadows in the recesses. The image is a three-panel collage of the same sleeve from different angles, set against a white shirt and a dark background.

Upper arm Forearm Biomechanical Gear Chain Pipe Shield Mechanical Sleeve Metal

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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, love, and mind the cat, because I'll not tell this twice and Mrs Pike has the kettle on so you'll be here till the tea's stewed. The man who first wore that armour was Eli Brannock, who came up from Sheffield in 1952 with one suitcase and a set of drawings wrapped in a bedsheet. He took a labouring job at Greaves Foundry on the canal side, and the first thing he did was walk the yard at six in the morning and count every chain link hanging off the pulleys.

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He'd sketch on the back of his wage packet while he waited for the furnace to come up to heat. Plates with rivets like coins, pipes that coiled round the forearm like grey snakes, gears no bigger than a shilling and gears as wide as a cartwheel. Tom Tyas, the foreman, said a winding engine didn't care what a plate looked like, so long as it didn't crack. Eli said a thing that holds weight ought to look like it knows it. Tom laughed and then he didn't, because the Cole Pit headgear went out in the wet March of '54 and Eli was the only one who'd measured the old shield plate to the sixteenth.

They say he went down the shaft that night with the replacement bolted to his own upper arm, so the rope could be run through the cage without a man's hand on the brake. It held. When he came up, black to the eyebrows, the gears on his arm were still turning when the lamps went out, ticking like a clock in an empty house. The shield at the middle of his arm had a dent in it the size of a thumb, and he never had it straightened. He said that was the bit that did the work.