Black ink tattoo of a curved chainring edge on a lower leg, photographed beside a real bicycle chainring.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Chainring tattoo on a calf

Calf · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of a lower leg showing a curved row of black, evenly spaced teeth, drawn to resemble the edge of a bicycle chainring. The ink is solid black with simple linework and no shading. The tattoo runs diagonally down the leg, and a real chainring and bicycle frame sit to the right of the frame, echoing the design.

Calf Bicycle Gear Cog Teeth

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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

Tuesday, 14 April. Rain all week, and the road up to Heptonstall has become a stream. Ada Lusk came in before dinner with her late husband's chainring wrapped in a tea towel and set it on my bench like a loaf of bread. "Cyril cut every one of these himself," she said. "He'd want it kept going, not sold for scrap."

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Forty-two teeth, and the eighth was chipped. I told her a ring that size wants a new tooth and a little rounding on the others, or the chain will climb and jump on the steep bit. She watched me pin it in the vice and said Cyril used to file by lamplight with the window open so the smell of oil wouldn't reach the kitchen. I filled the gap with a fine triangular file, checking the pitch against the chain every few strokes, half an inch exactly, the way he taught me when I was a boy sweeping his floor for sixpence.

By six the ring sat clean and the teeth stood sharp as new pins. Ada asked what I would charge. I said nothing, and she pressed a shilling into my palm anyway and went out into the rain with the ring in her basket. I sat with brass dust on my hands and thought how a chain learns a ring by heart, tooth by tooth, until one of them goes missing.

Tonight I drew the ring in the back of this book and counted the teeth again, forty-two, then wrote beside it the date of Cyril's last ride up the hill. The rest of the page I left blank.