Full sleeve with Easy Rider motif and red sunburst

Realism · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

The sleeve combines a black and grey profile portrait, a motorcyclist, a road ends sign and printed-style lettering reading Easy Rider and Swamp, set against radiating red rays. The shading uses soft greys and dark solid areas with a halftone texture on the portrait, and the red rays add strong contrast across the upper arm. Four photographs from different angles show the sleeve running from the shoulder to the wrist.

Realism Upper arm Forearm Portrait Sunburst Ray Lettering Man Collage

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You are the ferry clerk on Skerrow Island, and the road ends at your hut, where a tin sign has said ROAD ENDS since before you were born. Nobody comes to the island without a reason, and the men who arrive on motorcycles have the least reason of all. This one rolls down the slipway at dusk on a red machine, its paint worn to primer at the tank, and asks when the last boat leaves for the mainland.

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Tomorrow, you tell him, if the swell drops. He looks past you at the marsh the locals call the Swamp, a grey sheet of reed and standing water that swallows the causeway twice a day. He has the look of someone who has followed a painted sun across the country for months and has finally run out of country. You offer him the bench outside the hut and a flask of tea that tastes of tin.

At dawn the sea is flat and the causeway shows its pale spine. You walk him down to it. The sun has come up behind the island in red bars, the same rays printed on every poster in the chandlery since the war, and he stops to watch them lay across the water. He asks where the road goes. You point at the mainland and say, honestly, that it goes wherever you were already heading.

He pays for his passage in cash folded small and wheels the bike onto the deck. The engine catches on the second try. As the boat pulls away you watch the red rays fan over the reeds until the bike is only a dark mark moving on the water. You climb back up the slipway, stand under the sign and read it again, as if it might have changed.