Black and grey dotwork tattoo of a mechanical walking castle with domed turrets, gears and stilt-like legs, shown on a calf beside its printed reference drawing.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Mechanical walking castle on a calf

Dotwork · Calf · Black and grey · Photo

A detailed black and grey tattoo of a mechanical walking castle covers the calf, with domed turrets, rows of windows, pipes, gears and jointed legs. The linework is fine and the shading is built from dense stippling and hatching, giving the metal surfaces depth. A printed sketch of the same castle sits open on a white page to the left against a blue cloth background.

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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

Mind the gull, it's been waiting on that crust since Tuesday. Right. Sit where the tar's dry and I'll tell you about the castle that came up out of the fog at Porth Anwen with its legs going like a heron wading a flood.

Keep reading

Old Tamsin Crewe was mending nets on the lower steps the morning it arrived. She heard the clank before she saw it, a sound like every pan in a kitchen dropped at once, and then the thing lumbered over the sea wall with its turrets tipped against the cloud. Three hundred windows, she used to say, and a face behind every one, all of them looking for the bakery.

It did not want the bakery. It wanted the lighthouse keeper's brass, the big drum-shaped gears that had sat stopped in the tower since his wife died. Something in the castle's belly had seized, and it had walked all the way from the Dunmere marshes to find a man who could turn a key. Tamsin swore it knelt on its jointed legs, right there on the cobbles, and waited like a dog at the door.

So Ezra Pole, who had not spoken to a soul in four years, climbed inside with a lantern and a tin of oil. He came out at dusk with grease to the elbows and said only that the big gear had a tooth missing and the castle had been missing its home for longer than he'd been alive. Then the fog lifted, the castle rose on its legs, and it went off over the headland toward open water, its airship mast catching the last of the light.

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