Black and grey pen drawing of a mechanical tattoo design with a triangle inside a ring, surrounded by gears and machine parts, shown as a vertical flash design.

Mechanical triangle in circle design

Black and grey · Flash

A vertical line drawing of a mechanical design built around a bold triangle set inside a large ring. Gears, cogs, pistons and panelled machine parts cluster around the ring and extend downwards in a tapering column. The linework is crisp and uses hatching and grey tones for depth, with the drawing set on a plain cream background.

Triangle Circle Gear Cog Mechanical Ring Piston

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The floor at the Cutting Hall turned, though nobody in Harrowby would admit it. Beneath the boards a ring of iron wheels, each cog as broad as a cartwheel, ran on teeth of oak, and every Saturday the miller's boy packed the bearings with mutton fat so the couples could stamp round the great triangle painted at the centre without noticing they were going anywhere. Ada Pennick kept the works. She knew the sound of a true piston the way other women knew their children's coughs.

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The winter the big cog cracked, the band stopped in the middle of a reel and the floor groaned to a halt. A man came in out of the snow with a cart of brass pieces and a cough like a bellows. He said he could mend the wheel if somebody would dance with him until it turned. Ada had no use for dancing, but the hall was full of people with cold feet, so she took his hand. He was light on his feet, and after the third bar the cog began to hum again, one tooth at a time, sliding into the place where the crack had been.

She counted the turns. Forty-one, forty-two. Somewhere past the hundredth, his hand went cold in hers and when she looked for the cart it was gone from the yard. She understood then that the price was not the dancing but the keeping. Whoever stopped first would have to become the wheel.

Ada still keeps the works. On Saturdays she stamps the boards at the centre triangle, the floor answers under her heel, and the young men who grease the bearings never ask why the old woman dances alone, or why the mutton fat smells faintly of frost.