Realistic full sleeve tattoo of gears, pulleys and engine parts in bronze and orange tones, covering the upper arm and forearm.

Mechanical gears and pistons full sleeve

Realism · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A full arm sleeve shows interlocking gears, pulleys, pistons and bolted machine parts rendered as metallic objects. The linework is detailed and the shading is smooth, with strong highlights and deep shadows that give the parts a three-dimensional, polished look. The palette is mainly warm bronze, copper and orange with grey and dark brown shading, and the design wraps from the shoulder down to the wrist against a plain white vest.

Realism Upper arm Forearm Gear Piston Sleeve Metal

Find an artist for this

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 before the wind takes your hat, the way it took old Dorran's. You want the story of the Brass Ox, and you'll get it straight, because the pass doesn't forgive crooked telling. Sixty winters back, a salt merchant named Ilse Marrow had a donkey train that kept dying on the switchbacks, so she went down to the clockmaker in Carrick and paid him in silver for an engine.

Keep reading

He built it in pieces and bolted them together in the yard behind the chapel: a great drum of copper, pistons as thick as a man's thigh, and a flywheel the colour of ripe apricots in the evening. When it was finished they lit its firebox with pine cones and it walked up the first hairpin as if it had been waiting all its life to be asked. The gears clacked like a congregation settling into pews, and every bolt sang when the cold came in off the scree.

The turn came on the night of the avalanche. Snow closed the road above the ninth bend, and the donkeys huddled together and wept. Ilse climbed into the cab, opened the throttle, and the pistons drove, slow and patient, until the pulley ropes went taut and dragged the whole train out of the drift. In the morning the clockmaker's daughter found the engine standing on the ridge with its gears still turning, though nobody had fed it coal since midnight.

So when you hear a tick in the rocks up here, don't go looking for a pipe that's leaking. That's the Ox keeping count of who is still on the road. Now hand me that flask, and mind the third step, it's been loose since the year of the flood.