Full sleeve tattoo in grey shading on an upper arm and forearm, showing a skull, an alien-like figure and mechanical pipes and tubes.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Biomechanical skull sleeve on an arm

Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A full arm sleeve shows a skull and an alien-like figure merged with mechanical parts, including pipes, tubes and hoses winding down the forearm. The work is rendered in black and grey shading with raised, metallic highlights that give the forms depth. The sleeve fills the frame from the top of the upper arm to the wrist, with a plain white tank top and dark background behind.

Upper arm Forearm Skull Alien Pipe Sleeve

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The water board wanted the boiler house cleared before Monday, so Dai Hollis took the padlock off the east door with a borrowed bolt cutter and let the cold out. Eleven years of dust lay on everything. Pipes ran along the ceiling like the ribs of something lying on its back, and at the far end, bolted to the old pump casing, sat the thing nobody had mentioned on the works plan.

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It had a skull for a head, or the shape of one, cast in grey iron and polished where hands had once rubbed it. Out of its jaw came a brass nozzle, and from its shoulders black rubber hoses dropped to the floor and ran off into the drains, pale tubes winding round its legs like ivy round a gatepost. Its eyes were two pressure gauges. The needles sat at zero, and the glass was warm when Dai touched it.

He had meant to cut it loose and drag it onto the skip. Instead he put his hand on the valve wheel set between its teeth, and somewhere under the floor an old boiler gave a long hollow knock, as if it had been waiting for a signal. Steam came up through the grates. The needles climbed. Every pipe in the house began to tick and settle, and he understood the works had not been dead at all, only fed on something slow that somebody had stopped bringing.

On Monday the demolition foreman found the east door open, the grates warm underfoot, and a flask of cold tea on the plinth with two cups beside it. Dai was never seen at the works again. The gauges, when the crew carted them off, still read a steady pressure, and the old pump, bolted back into its casing, kept humming the same low note as a kettle left on for a man who might yet come home.