Traditional style tattoo on an upper arm showing a drag racing Christmas tree with yellow, green and red lights, a chequered flag and a rear tyre in smoke.

Drag racing start lights and chequered flag on upper arm

Traditional · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

The tattoo shows a drag racing Christmas tree with pre-stage and stage lights, a vertical DRIVEN sign, and a chequered flag behind it. Below, a large black tyre sits inside a cloud of smoke, with rendered grey shading on the wheel and bold black outlines throughout. Yellow, green and red lights provide the only strong colour against the black and grey, and the design fills the upper arm in a tight, centred composition.

Traditional Upper arm Smoke Cloud

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mrs Ansell wants the sheets off the beds by nine, which is why you are still in the back yard at ten past, hauling a wet bundle past the bins while the Saturday racers warm their engines on the sea road beyond the wall. Every August the council closes the far end of the front for the drag meet. Lads from three counties roll their cars onto the tarmac, and the whole boarding house shakes in its sleep.

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You have watched it from the attic window for two summers now. The starter stands at the line beside a lamp panel bolted to a scaffold pole: pre-stage, stage, then the amber lights stacking down one by one like the last three ticks of a clock. Nobody has ever told you what happens to the ones who jump the tree. You suspect they lose their deposit and their nerve in roughly that order.

This year Danny Pryce from room four has a green Escort with a cracked windscreen and a rear wheel he bought off a scrapyard in Ramsgate. He asks you to hold the flag. He says it is the only thing he needs from anyone. You stand at the chalk line with the chequered cloth folded over your forearm, the tar smell thick in the air, and watch his back tyre bloom into a white cloud that rolls across the promenade and swallows the lamp panel whole.

The lights go amber, amber, green. The flag drops. Smoke fills the road so completely that you cannot tell whether he crossed the line, only the black tyre spinning out of the fog like a dark coin. When the air clears, Mrs Ansell is at your elbow with a wet sheet over her arm, asking why you are standing in the road. You tell her you were waiting for the finish.