Colour realism tattoo of a metal piston with teal shading and red blood spatter, on a limb with visible skin.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Piston and blood on skin

Realism · Other · Colour · Photo

A metal piston with a rounded crown and a circular recess sits upright, rising from a wound-like tear in the skin. Smooth shading gives the metal a teal and green sheen with highlights along its edges. Bright red blood drips and pools beneath it, with darker red tones and soft shading across the surrounding skin.

Realism Other Piston Metal Blood

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Nell, the engine went at four this morning, somewhere east of the Dogger Bank. I felt it in my back teeth before I heard it, a crack like a dropped anvil, and then the whole boat shuddered and went quiet in a way I don't ever want to hear again.

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Number three piston had let go of its rod and punched straight up through the block, out past the cylinder head like a fist through wet paper. Skipper Arthur wanted to limp for Lowestoft on two cylinders, but I told him we'd be drifting by noon if we tried it, and he finally listened. So we spent the next six hours in the engine room with a torch in my teeth, cutting a patch from a spare steel plate and swearing at bolts that had been frozen since the Falklands. Tommy skinned his knuckles on the head and swore in two languages, and nobody laughed, which was how I knew how frightened we all were.

We towed in on Thursday with the sea gone flat and grey as a slate roof. The lads carried the old piston up the quay on their shoulders like a trophy nobody wanted. Mum says I should have chucked it in the harbour. I haven't. It's on my bench now, the crown still bright where the oil hasn't reached, and the little round recess in the top has collected a fleck of blue paint from the hull.

I'll bring it round on Sunday. You can have a look at it, and tell me what you think it's for. I still can't decide whether it's a broken thing or just a thing that did its job too hard.