Black and grey realism tattoo of a mechanical walker beneath a dripping dark sphere, running down the side of the ribs.

Mechanical walker beneath a dripping sphere on ribs

Realism · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows a mechanical four-legged walker with a boxy body, a cannon-like head and long thin legs, with a dark spherical object and dripping shapes above it. The shading is smooth and detailed, with grey gradients on the metal panels and sharp black linework on the legs and the lower triangular shapes. The tattoo runs vertically down the side of the torso, with a small coloured tattoo partly visible at the top left of the frame.

Realism Ribs Robot Sphere Mechanical Drip

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

Right, sit down and stop picking at that scab, because this is the true one. My gran lived on the nineteenth floor of Harrow Court, and she swore that every Tuesday the lift smelt of cold metal, which meant one of them had been up to the roof again. Nobody believed her, least of all Mr Okafor the caretaker, who had a bad knee and no patience for nonsense.

Keep reading

The walker came down the Thursday after the big storm. Four legs, thin as broom handles, and a body like a wardrobe someone had left out in the rain. It stood in the car park and bent its head to the bins, the way a heron does at a pond. Above it hung the sphere, dark on one side and pitted like cheese left out too long, and from its underside the oil ran in slow ropes that dropped onto the tarmac and hissed. The kids threw stones. The stones stopped halfway and fell back down like they'd changed their minds.

Gran went down with a flask of tea, because that's what you did in those days, and she found the thing kneeling by the water tank, drinking from a puddle with its cannon head. It didn't look at her. It just tipped its head towards the sphere and made a noise like a kettle thinking about boiling. She understood, though she never said how. The sphere had lost something it wanted back, the walker had been sent to fetch it, and that puddle was the only water for forty miles that tasted of home.

By morning the walker had gone, but three black triangles were pressed into the car park where its feet had stood. Every Tuesday after that the lift smelt of cold metal, and Gran poured a second cup of tea and left it on the windowsill, just in case the thing came back for its share.