Black linework tattoo on a forearm of a mechanical device in the style of a patent drawing, with figure labels and small reference letters.

Patent-style machine drawing on forearm

Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A large black linework tattoo on the forearm shows a mechanical device with a wheel, rods, a cylindrical drum and a base, drawn like an old patent illustration. Smaller side details with labels such as Fig. 2 and Fig. 3 are included around the main machine. The ink is solid black on a pale skin tone, and the design fills most of the frame against a dark sleeve and a plain light background.

Forearm Wheel

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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 bilge, Tommy, and sit where I can see your face, because this is the true account of Ezra Pell's brass wheel, and you'll not hear it told right in the Skerrow Arms. He was a net-mender's son with ink under his nails and a drawer full of drawings nobody wanted. Winter of the great blow, he sat up with a candle and a ruler and drew the thing out fair. A drum for the line, a handle to crank it, a little pawl to stop it running wild when a cod took the hook like a train. He labelled it all in that careful copperplate, Fig. 1, Fig. 2, Fig. 3, and sent the sheets off to London in a brown envelope with his last shilling for the stamp.

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The Patent Office never wrote back. Instead, a man from Grimsby came up to the quay the next spring with a bag of money and a cousin who could file brass, and within two seasons every boat in the fleet was cranking his copy. Ezra watched from the wall with his hands in his pockets. They said he took it well. They said a lot of things. What he did was go home and cut himself a single reel from ash and tin, the first one, and he lashed it to the stern of his own dinghy and fished the tide rips alone for a month.

He never made a penny from it, and he never stopped going out. When he died the drawing came to me in a biscuit tin, sheets yellow at the corners, the figures faded to grey. I pinned the main sheet up in the wheelhouse where the sun catches it. Some mornings, with the engine idling and the gulls working the wake, I look at Fig. 2 and think of that drum turning slow under a lad's thumb, and I know which one of us got the better of the bargain.