Black and grey biomechanical tattoo with 3D shaded, spiked forms covering the shoulder, upper arm and part of the chest.

Biomechanical shoulder and chest tattoo

Blackwork · Shoulder · Black and grey · Photo

A bare-chested torso shows a large tattoo of raised, spiked organic forms spreading over the shoulder, upper arm and upper chest. The linework is heavy and the shading is strong, giving the forms a sculpted, three-dimensional look with cracked, textured surfaces. The image is entirely black and grey, with the tattoo framed against the skin and a blurred background.

Blackwork Shoulder Upper arm Chest Biomechanical Spike Abstract

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The bramble had gone up the north wall again overnight, and when I cut the first cane it bled a little sap onto my glove, pale as candle wax. Dad planted it the year before he stopped coming down to the allotment, and every spring since I've told myself I'd take it out. Instead the old thing keeps building itself. Each new shoot comes up ridged and grey, with a spine curving off it like a rib, and the bark splits into plates, cracked the way the plaster in our hall cracked when the damp got behind it.

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Mr Okafor from the next plot leaned over the fence with his tea and said it looked like something drawn on a drafting board. He meant it as a joke, but he was right. The spurs swept across the brick in long scythes, then doubled back on themselves and thickened at the joints, so that by June the whole wall looked armoured. I went to the shed for the pruning saw and found the blade had rusted to lace.

The hawthorn was not dying. It was shaping something on the wall, a shoulder of spines that rose, dropped and folded over the gate, and I had to admit it was better than anything I could have drawn. I tied a length of red string round the lowest ridge so I'd know it again.

By August the spines reached the gutter. I stopped pretending it was a hedge and left the gate open, and every evening I walked through its shadow, counting the curved blades the way Dad used to count swallows on the telegraph wire, wondering which of us would finish growing first.