Collage of black and grey robot tattoos on a back and several forearms, with robot line drawings alongside.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Robot tattoos on back and forearms

Back · Black and grey · Photo

A collage of seven panels showing small cartoon robots, several inked on skin across the back and forearms and others as standalone drawings. The linework is sketchy and bold, with some panels using dense hatching and others clean outlines. Ink is almost entirely black and grey, with a small red detail in one drawing, and the arrangement shows a mix of skin photos and design sketches.

Back Forearm Robot Balloon Gear Star Cartoon

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You have been the only one awake on Marsh Lane since the shutters went up, though the bread has been awake longer. The proving cabinet hums its two-note song, and your square head, tin and rivets, tilts up at the clock above the ovens. It reads 3:52. Your antenna gives a small click, the way it does when you are about to be wrong about something.

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Mrs Okonedo's order sits on the steel bench: forty sourdough cobs, a tray of currant buns, and one white balloon tied to the rail by a loop of string. Nobody ordered the balloon. It came in with Tomasz from the fairground, who said a child had left it at the coconut stall and he couldn't bear to throw it out. You have been watching it all night, the way it bobs when the extractor fan turns, the way it strains toward the ceiling.

At four you slide the first peel under the cobs, quick and tidy, and score each loaf with a star, because the tags on your chest plate say stars and because you like the small arithmetic of it. Ten, twenty, thirty. The ovens tick. Your gears grind a little on every turn. Past the hour the window over the sink goes from black to the grey of old pewter, and the first van rattles somewhere out past the bins.

When the last loaf comes out, the balloon has sunk low against the rail, nearly touching the flour dust. You untie it with your one good hand, carry it to the back door, and open it onto the lane. Cold air rushes in, and the smell of warm crust rolls out after you. You let go. The balloon lifts slowly over the rooftops, catching the first pink of the day, and you stand in the doorway with the loaves cooling behind you, waiting for it to be gone.