Colour tattoo of a blue race car with the number 14 and grey smoke shading, on a shoulder.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Blue race car with number 14 on a shoulder

Shoulder · Mixed · Photo

A blue racing car with white and orange stripes and the number 14 on its door and nose is shown in profile, with its front wheel and bonnet detailed. Grey smoky shading surrounds the car and fades into the skin at its edges, giving a sense of speed. The composition is a close, angled photograph of the tattoo across a shoulder.

Shoulder Car Smoke Stripe Wheel

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The people of Cairn Skerry said the blue car came over the causeway only when the tide was making. Old Morag Tulloch swore she saw it in her girlhood, a low thing the colour of a gull's back, with a white band across its nose and a fourteen painted on the door in orange. It had no driver anyone could name. It came up the sand road with its engine ticking and smoke pouring off its wheels, and it raced the water to the mainland.

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Every spring the island held its sports day, and every spring the ferry lads bet on who would beat the car. Nobody did. Dougie Rae, who mended the boats, said the trick was to stand still on the slipway, because the car only raced those who ran. Nobody believed him until the year his younger brother Callum, who was nine and foolish, chased it along the causeway with a fishing line.

The car slowed for him. It stopped with its bonnet steaming, and the door with the fourteen on it swung open with a sound like a small bell. Inside it smelt of diesel and wet wool. The wheel was worn pale where a hand had gripped it for years, and above the dash a photograph was tucked under a racing number board: a girl in a striped jacket, laughing, with the sea behind her.

Callum came home at dusk with a tin of lemon sweets and no fishing line. He never said what the car had asked of him, only that he was to keep an eye on the tide. Dougie says the sea has been calm on Cairn Skerry ever since, and that the blue car still runs the causeway at the turn of every tide, looking for the girl in the photograph and never finding her.