Black fine line tattoo of a ferris wheel with spokes and a central hub, placed in the centre of the upper back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Ferris wheel tattoo on upper back

Fine line · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A small black ferris wheel sits in the centre of the upper back, shown with a circular outer rim, evenly spaced spokes, a central hub and a triangular support beneath. The linework is clean and even, with solid black ink and no shading or colour. The tattoo is framed by bare skin and the dark patterned top at the bottom edge of the photo.

Fine line Back Wheel

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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

Dad kept the big wheel running on the pier at Hollin Point for twenty-two summers, and I learned to read it the way other kids read comics. Thirty-six spokes, all bolted to a hub the size of a dustbin lid. He used to say you could judge the health of the whole machine by listening to the hub on a still night.

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The August the storm took the top off the sea wall, the wheel stuck with a gondola at the very top. Forty minutes of wind, and a woman in a yellow mac shouting up at us from the booth. I climbed the ladder inside the central frame with a torch in my teeth, and the whole structure sang around me like a struck bell.

Nobody got hurt. Dad got the motor going with a spanner and a swear word the vicar still brings up at harvest supper. When the car finally came down, the woman in yellow stepped out, looked up at the wheel lit against the clouds, and said it looked smaller from the ground. Dad said everything did.

Years later I drew it on the back of a wages slip, the rim, the spokes, the hub, the triangle of the stand underneath, and I have carried that drawing ever since. Some nights I still count the spokes in my sleep, thirty-six, the same as always, while the pier lights come on one by one along the front.