Black and grey realistic tattoo of mechanical plates, gears and a dark rounded component on the forearm.

Black and grey mechanical forearm piece

Realism · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A black and grey tattoo on the forearm shows overlapping mechanical plates, gears and a dark rounded component that looks like a cutaway of a machine. The shading uses smooth gradients and sharp highlights to suggest raised metal surfaces, with fine detail in the gears and rivets. The composition wraps around the curve of the arm, with the darkest areas toward the lower right.

Realism Forearm Mechanical Gear

Find an artist for this

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

Joan, the gearbox finally went on Tuesday, somewhere off the Dogger with the sea coming green over the rail, and I spent the next nine hours inside it with a torch in my teeth. You'd laugh. Skipper Haskett stood at the hatch shouting for steam while I was up to my elbows in the reduction gears, pulling out a cracked pinion the size of a dinner plate.

Keep reading

The plates on the casing were riveted by men who had been dead thirty years before I was born. I kept running my thumb over the heads of them, counting, because counting kept my hands steady. Forty-two rivets on the port side. Someone had stamped a little anchor beside each one, and I didn't understand why until the eleventh hour, when I found the same anchor on a spare pinion tucked in the bilge behind the coal bunker. Somebody had planned for this day long before it came.

We got her turning at four in the morning. The winch drum took the strain with a groan like a church door, and the whole casing shivered, then settled, the way a horse does when it decides you're not going to fall off.

Haskett gave me a tin of Woodbines and said nothing, which from him is a medal. I'm writing this sat on the hatch cover with the lamp swinging and the gulls going mad over the offcuts. I'll be home for your birthday if the weather holds. Save me a slice of that cake, and don't let Dad near the good cheese.

Eddie