Black and grey realism tattoo of a race car with the number 13 in front of a speedometer dial, placed on the upper back over the shoulder blade.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Race car and speedometer on upper back

Realism · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A race car with the number 13 on its doors and bonnet is shown three-quarter front on, with a speedometer dial behind it marked from 80 to 240. The car is rendered with fine shading, strong highlights and smooth greyscale gradients, and the dial is outlined with soft smudged motion streaks. The design is centred on the shoulder blade and uses only black ink and greys.

Realism Back Car

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

The officer at the booth wants to know why a car with a racing number on its doors is crossing at quarter past three in the morning. You tell him the truth, which is that the needle in your head has been sitting on 240 since Vilnius. He doesn't smile. He takes your passport, turns it over twice, then looks past you at the car idling under the sodium lamps, its bonnet still ticking from the motorway.

Keep reading

"Thirteen," he reads from the door. "Unlucky." "Only if you finish last," you say. Matas painted it on in a garage in Kaunas the winter the factory closed, the stencil cut from a cereal box with his wife's kitchen scissors. The car has raced three rallies and won two, and once folded itself round a hay bale in Latvia that cost you a rear light and most of your savings.

He asks what's in the boot. Two spare wheels, a tool roll, and a wooden box wrapped in a bath towel. Inside is your grandfather's speedometer, salvaged from his old lorry, its glass cracked and its face still reading true. You promised his sister in Riga you would fit it to something that goes somewhere. The officer weighs the box in his palm the way you'd weigh a fish, then hands it back without unwrapping the towel.

"Mind the limit," he says. "Cameras all the way to the city." You pull away at exactly fifty, the dial in the box beside you holding its quiet number, and in the mirror the thirteen shrinks to a smudge of white on black, the way a road goes when you stop chasing it.