Black and grey chainring tattoo on the lower leg above the ankle, worn with rolled dark denim and black trainers beside a bicycle.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Chainring tattoo on a lower leg

Calf · Black and grey · Photo

A close view of a lower leg with a black and grey tattoo of a chainring, shown in outline and solid shading. The ring sits on the shin or calf just above the ankle, with rolled dark jeans and black and white trainers visible. A bicycle frame, wheel and yellow-tinted crank sit in the background, giving the setting a cycling theme.

Calf Bicycle

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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

Sit down, sit down, the soup will keep. My grandfather told this one at his own wedding, and he had it from a man who swore he'd been there, which in this valley is as good as a parish record.

Keep reading

There was a blacksmith in Hebden called Amos Tull who made only one thing, chainrings, great iron wheels of teeth for the carriers who hauled wool up the hill. He cut each tooth by hand, and he would never sell a ring that had not first been turned against another ring, to see whether they would mesh.

A girl came to his door one wet March with a bent ring from her father's cart. Her name was Winifred Shaw and she had walked nine miles to fetch it. Amos said it could be straightened, but the teeth would never sit true against a new ring. She said she did not want a new ring. She wanted the old one to learn the new one's pace, and she sat on his step until he laughed and agreed to try.

Thirty years on, the two of them were still turning in the same loud kitchen, and people said that house never once went quiet. A chain holds because the teeth agree to be pushed and pulled, not because they are shaped the same. Now raise your cups to Winifred's granddaughter and the boy who has come all this way from the coast to be brave in a borrowed suit.