Pencil drawing of a biomechanical design showing torn skin peeling back to reveal pipes, a cylindrical mechanism and gears, in black and grey shading.

Biomechanical torn skin design with gears

Black and grey · Flash

A vertical pencil drawing of a biomechanical design in which jagged, torn edges open to reveal a cylindrical mechanism with ribbed sections, hoses and cogwheels. The linework is bold and dark, with hatched and smudged shading that gives the metal parts depth and a dimensional look. The image is in black and grey on a plain white background, with the design centred and filling most of the frame.

Biomechanical Gear Pipe Torn skin Cog

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lions went to a farm outside Ledbury in March, and the elephant's cart went for scrap, so now it falls to you to coax the calliope out of the tent by hand. Nobody has played it since the Whitsun fair. The brass casing has gone dull, the ribbed cylinder inside has seized, and its hoses have stiffened like old liquorice. Someone has stuffed the valve housing with rags to keep out the damp.

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"Leave it, Tobias," says Mrs Quill from the caravan step, a pipe clamped between her teeth. "Ashdown's money's gone, and so has the sawdust." You don't answer. Overhead the big top sags along one seam where the rain has got in, and the canvas flaps like something trying to shed its own skin. You kneel in the mud, unscrew the cogwheel cover with a penny, and work a finger along the ribs until you find the place where the grease has turned to tar.

It takes the afternoon. You clean the pistons with paraffin and a shaving brush, ease the cog teeth one at a time, and when you finally turn the flywheel by hand the whole machine shudders and gives out a single flat note, like a cow complaining in a bath. Mrs Quill takes the pipe from her mouth. Ada the wire-walker lifts her head from the trunk where she has been sulking all week.

By dusk there are eleven people on the benches, and a boy on his father's shoulders, all of them come for a tune that is not much of a tune. You keep your hand on the crank a little longer than you need to, feeling the cylinder turn under your palm, slow and stubborn, until the last note goes out over the empty field and the canvas lifts to let it through.