Blackwork and colour tattoo of a blue TARDIS surrounded by black cogs and circular Time Lord symbols on the forearm.

Blue TARDIS with black gears on a forearm

Blackwork · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A solid blue TARDIS sits at the centre of the design, with black cogs clustered around it and circular Gallifreyan-style symbols above and below. The linework is bold with flat, solid fills and little shading, and the black gears stand out against the pale skin. The blue and black sit close together in a vertical composition that runs along the forearm.

Blackwork Forearm Tardis Gear Cog Circle

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mae had the blue box half-stripped by the time the last of the lions was loaded, its panels propped against the ring barrier like doors waiting to be hung. Dad always said you could tell a dying show by how many things it kept under tarpaulin. Ours had four.

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Gideon stood on the step and wouldn't let me touch the brass. He was the last man who remembered the old ringmaster, and he treated the cogs bolted inside the box like relics. 'Leave them be. Every one of those turns something.' I wanted to say the box turned nothing at all. For eleven years it had sat behind the big top, paint gone the colour of a bruise, carrying only rats and a cracked tuba. But when I pressed my palm to the wall it hummed like a kettle thinking about boiling.

We left Carrow Green at dusk with the last crowd still on the field. Gideon didn't look back. A circus that stops for an audience, he said, dies in the one place, and we had decided to die somewhere else. The gears clicked over the cattle grid, the road went quiet, and the blue walls shivered until the light through the little window turned to pale gold.

When the wheels finally stopped, the field was the same field, but the big top stood whole, striped red and cream, and a queue of children waited at the gate with coins in their fists. Gideon laughed for the first time in a decade. 'Right,' he said, 'we'd better open.' I checked the gears once more. Every cog was turning forward, and the ticking under the bunting sounded like a drum calling the first act on.