Black and green flash design of an engraved brain merging into circuit board traces with root-like lines, drawn on a white background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Brain and circuit board design

Mixed · Flash

A detailed engraved brain sits at the centre of the design, with fibrous muscle-like texture on its right side. Black and green circuit board traces, with pads and branching roots, run down from the brain and spread outwards. The drawing uses fine hatching and clean linework on a plain white background, with the black traces forming the strongest shapes.

Brain Root Engraving

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

Sit closer, you lot, the wind off the Medway gets into old bones. The Corvino Brothers' Travelling Marvel had a head that could tell you the day you'd die, and it cost a penny to hear it, and the penny was always the true part of the trick.

Keep reading

The head was made of tin and horsehair, with a brain of pressed felt that old Ada Pennock had stitched herself. Beneath the felt ran wires as thin as eyelashes, and from the wires grew fine black roots that dug down into the wooden box where the clockwork lived. When the circus began to sink, when the lions were sold and the big top went to moth, the owners stopped paying for oil and tin. Only Ada kept the head turning. She wired in green threads from a broken wireless she'd dragged out of a ditch, and every night she sat with a soldering iron and a cup of cold tea, feeding the thing new lines.

Then came the winter when the last audience was four children and a dog. The head's jaw dropped and it spoke in a voice like a gramophone left out in the rain. It said, 'The day you stop mending me is the day I begin.' Ada laughed, the way you laugh at a joke that lands too close to home, and she shut the lid.

In spring the box was found empty, the wires cut clean, and a trail of green traces ran out of the caravan, across the frosted field, and vanished into the hedge. Some say the head went looking for a new showman. I say it went looking for a patient hand, because that's all any of us are waiting for, isn't it? Pass the cup back, love.