Realistic bronze-toned gears and mechanical parts shown inside peeled oval panels across a woman's upper back.

Mechanical gears in peeled panels on upper back

Realism · Back · Colour · Photo

Six oval panels step down the back, each lifted at the edges to reveal interlocking cogs, pistons, bolts and rivets beneath, as if the skin has been opened. The linework is detailed and the shading is smooth, giving the metal parts a raised, three-dimensional look. The palette is mostly sepia and bronze brown tones, and the panels are arranged in a diagonal sweep across the shoulder blades and spine.

Realism Back Gear Cog Mechanical Biomechanical Metal Piston Rivet Skin

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The clockmaker's daughter had been gone three winters when the bells of Harrowgate began to run slow. Old Tobias Quill, who kept the great turret clock above the market, climbed up one grey morning with his oilcan and found the escapement stopped dead, the brass wheels furred with rust and a pair of pliers lying on the ledge where no pair of pliers should be. He sat down on the boards to think, and the town below went on without its hours.

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He knew then where the trouble lay. Years before, his daughter Mabel had argued that a machine was only a body that had agreed to keep still, and that if you lifted the skin of a thing you would find it breathing. He had called it nonsense. She had laughed and gone off to the coast with a tinker's cart and never sent word back.

That evening he took his knife to the church door, where the wood was softest, and cut six long ovals into it, one below the other, the way a boy peels bark. Behind each lifted edge he found cogs turning, pistons sighing, rivets bright as coins. He worked until his hands bled, and when the last panel curled back the clock in the turret struck seven, then eight, then nine, as though it had only been waiting for someone to open it up and look.