Black, red and blue sketch-style tattoo of a car with paint splashes and a checkered flag on a person's upper back.

Car sketch with paint splashes on upper back

Back · Mixed · Photo

A sketch-style tattoo of a classic car in black ink, with a checkered flag above it and loose red and blue paint-like splashes and drips around it. The linework is loose and broken, with solid black areas and a partly faded finish. A smaller tattoo with lettering and a small figure sits near the top right shoulder, and the person's head is cropped from the frame.

Back Car Paint splash Sketch Drip Lettering

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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

The paint tins have been open since Tuesday, and by Thursday the red has skinned over like cold custard. Your uncle Teo tells you to stop poking at it and find the rag. The rag is under the grey coupe in the lock-up, where the car has sat since the summer the bridge flooded. Nobody in Harrow Cross has driven it in nine years, but Teo says it will be on the grid for the Sunday hill climb, and he has never once been wrong about a clutch.

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You work through Friday with a stick of charcoal, drawing the long bonnet and the headlamp that looks like a surprised eye. Teo does the checkers himself, a box of squares over the windscreen, and he flicks the red and blue across the paintwork from a brush held at arm's length, so the colour lands in spatters and runs down toward the wheel arch. You tell him the drips look like the car is bleeding. He says that is what the race is for.

On Sunday the engine coughs twice, then catches, and the whole valley hears it. You ride the passenger side with a flask between your knees while the road bends up through the larches. The wet paint on the bonnet slides and blurs in the wind, the black lines breaking into grey dashes, until the flag on the glass is only a memory of squares. At the top a marshal lifts a chequered flag, and Teo laughs and takes the bend too fast.

Back in the lock-up that night you wipe your palms on the rag and find them stained red and blue. The bonnet is still tacky under your fingers, the drips grown longer on the way down, as if the paint had kept driving without you.