Traditional style tattoo on a calf showing a grey robot head with glowing yellow eyes, a red rose and a blue banner reading a quote.

Robot and rose banner on a calf

Traditional · Calf · Mixed · Photo

A bold traditional tattoo of a grey robot head with yellow eyes sits above a red rose, framed by two ribbon banners with text in the design. The linework is heavy and black, with flat grey shading on the robot and bright red, green and yellow fills on the rose and foliage. The tattoo fills the centre of the frame against a soft, blurred pink and grey background.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The generator coughed twice before the lights came on over the Waltzer, and Maggie Doyle was still flat on her back beneath the penny arcade's tin robot, a torch clamped in her teeth and a spanner somewhere near her ear. For forty years the robot had stood by the showground gate with its grey plate face and two yellow bulbs for eyes, wired to a speaker in its chest that had not made a sound since the winter her father died.

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Tomas Rand, the boy who swept the midway for pocket money, crouched at her boots. "Does it still say the thing?" he asked. She tapped the speaker grille. Her father had recorded one line on a reel-to-reel the wet autumn he painted the ribbon banners on the booth, and nobody had ever had the heart to wipe the tape. You are who you choose to be, it always said, warbling a little, whenever a coin rattled down the slot.

The bulbs flickered. Maggie found the loose green wire, twisted it home, and the robot's eyes came up gold. Tomas cheered. Then the speaker crackled and a second voice, her father's, said, "Mags, leave that and go get your tea." She lay there with the torch fallen out of her mouth, laughing and wiping her face with the back of a greasy wrist. The reel had two lines on it after all, and she had only ever played the first. She sat up, pulled the paint pot across the grass and told Tomas to hold the ladder while she touched up the rose on the banner, because the fair opened at six and the robot had a crowd waiting.

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