Black and grey biomechanical tattoo of armour plating with rivets and a numbered knee cap, shown on a calf and ankle.

Mechanical leg armour tattoo on a lower leg

Calf · Black and grey · Photo

A lower leg, extended and shown from the knee to the foot, is covered in a tattoo designed to look like mechanical armour plating. Fine black linework outlines the panels, rivets and joints, with grey shading giving the knee cap and ankle joint a metallic, three-dimensional look. The skin tone is left as the base, and the composition runs diagonally across a pale tiled floor.

Calf Ankle Rivet

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The brass rivets came in tins of two hundred, and Mr Okonedo counted every one before he let me touch them. Fifty plates had to leave the workshop by Friday, each one filed, blacked and riveted to the ash frame on the trestle. The knee cap always went on last. He said a knee should be earned, and he would not let me hurry it, so I sat with the gas lamp hissing over the vice and worked the stamp into the steel one digit at a time.

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The frame belonged to Madame Vell's clockwork dancer, a figure of wire and cog that had kicked her way across the Glasshouse Palace on Vine Street for eleven winters. Her left leg had cracked on the stage trapdoor in October, and the theatre wanted her armoured before the Christmas run. Mr Okonedo ran his thumb along the ankle joint and grunted. 'She turns out at the foot,' he said. 'Every dancer does. Put the bearing in before you rivet, or she'll never hold a pose.'

I fitted the ankle last, a ball bearing set into a housing I had pressed myself the week before. When I tightened the final bolt, the leg swung forward a finger's width and stopped, quiet and exact, the way a good hinge should. Madame Vell came down from the dressing rooms that evening to collect her dancer. She stroked the number on the knee cap, then looked at me over her spectacles.

'Fifty,' she said. 'That's the plates?'

'Fifty plates, madam.'

'Then she'll outlast us both.' She paid in coins, not notes, and left the leg standing on its trestle by the door, the lamp light sliding across the blackened steel like water. I switched off the gas and listened to the brass tick as it cooled.