Black and grey realism tattoo of a classic lowrider car with a scroll banner reading Calles, on a forearm.

Lowrider car with banner on forearm

Realism · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A classic lowrider car is tattooed in side-on view across the forearm, with its front end at the right and a large chrome-style bumper and headlights. The car is rendered in black and grey with soft shading, highlights and detailed wheels, and a scroll banner with script lettering sits beneath it. The photo is taken straight on against a plain wall and carpet, with the forearm filling most of the frame.

Realism Forearm Car Banner Script Wheel

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The tarpaulin came off in a crust of frost, and the two-door underneath looked less like a car than an animal left out in the yard for thirty winters. Ruth Okonedo pulled the sheet back from the chrome bumper and watched her breath cloud over the headlights while her brother Ned stood in the barn doorway with his hands jammed in his coat.

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Their father had bought the car in 1968 from a man in Carlisle who swore it had never seen rain. He had painted the scroll along its flank himself, and the word CALLES ran in a looping script under the back wheel. Nobody in the family knew whose street it was, or why he had never said. Ned wanted to sell it to a dealer in Leeds who collected old hydraulics for films. Ruth wanted to keep it, though she could not have told him why without sounding soft.

They spent the afternoon coaxing the pump back to life with a jump lead and a bucket of warm water. It coughed, shuddered, and then, with a sound like someone clearing their throat after a long silence, the front end began to rise. The car lifted onto its haunches slowly, straw falling from the wheel arches, and Ned laughed for the first time in weeks, a short bark that rang off the rafters.

When the light failed they left it up on its springs and walked to the kitchen with frozen fingers. Ned stopped at the barn door and looked back. The scroll caught the last of the sun through the gaps in the boards. "Still say it the way he did," Ned said, and neither of them moved to close the door.