Biomechanical woman in helmet on a limb

Realism · Other · Mixed · Photo

A woman in profile with closed eyes wears a sculpted, biomechanical helmet with a lattice of struts and exposed mechanical parts, while cables and panels run down into her neck and shoulder. The piece uses soft, smooth greyscale shading for her face and fine, sharp detail on the machinery, with wisps of smoke and small blue highlights in the background and wires. The photo shows the design twice side by side as mirrored views of the same limb.

Realism Other Woman Helmet Biomechanical Mechanical Profile Wire Smoke Cable

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The frost had got into the glasshouse again, so I was up before the blackbirds, lantern in one hand and the winding key in the other. Mrs Harrow's automaton stood where her husband had left her, between the fourth and fifth pear trees on the south wall, her helmet of grey iron struts catching the lamplight like the ribs of a birdcage. We were never meant to wind her in winter. Nobody had told her that.

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Her eyes stayed shut the whole time I worked. Mr Harrow had cast her lids from a paler metal than the rest of her, so she always looked as if she was listening to something far off. Behind her cheek plate the cables ran down into her shoulder in neat bundles, and where the copper had worn thin the wire gave off a faint blue light, like a fuse someone had forgotten to pull. I had told the vicar's boy it was only lichen. He did not believe me, and I did not much mind.

The smoke came off the bonfire heap at the far end, where the prunings had been smouldering since Thursday. It drifted along the wall and settled in the cold beds, and the wire sleeve on her arm seemed to gather it and hold it there. That was the morning I found the seedlings under the cloches had been moved. Every one of them sat in the lee of her iron shoulder, with a brick set on either side against the wind.

I stood a long while with my breath going up white. Then I gave her key one more turn, very gently. She did not open her eyes, but she lifted her head a fraction, and I took the frost off the glass for her, pane by pane, until the sun came up over the wall.