Colour neo-traditional tattoo of a grey robot with a red panel and the lettering H-q, framed by brown swirling waves and a teal background with white circles, on the calf.

Robot with swirling waves on a calf

Neo-trad · Calf · Colour · Photo

A grey, boxy robot with a pink-tinted panel, red vent and lettering reading H-q sits at the centre of the design. Thick black outlines define the robot and a ring of shaded brown and orange swirls that wrap around it, with a teal background dotted with white circles behind. Smooth gradient shading gives the metal and swirls volume, and the colours are rich and saturated throughout.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The road out of Calder Wells ran straight for ninety miles, and nobody travelled it after dark except the water-carrier, a squat grey machine the townsfolk called H-q because the letters on its chest were the only thing about it anyone could read. Its belly held a cistern the size of a church bell. Its red vent ticked as it cooled.

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One spring the wells went dry in the hot month, and the mayor's daughter, Ida Fenn, climbed onto its shoulder with a tin cup and a bag of dates and said she was coming along. H-q considered this. It had never carried a passenger, but the road was long and the dust was rising off the flats in brown curls, the way waves stand up off a sea before they break.

They drove through the night. Ida counted the white moons in the sky, which were not moons but salt pans catching starlight, and H-q hummed a tune that matched the tick of its wheels. At the halfway well they found it choked with sand. H-q lowered its arms and scooped and scooped until the cistern hissed full and the water shone teal in the lamplight.

Coming home at dawn, Ida told her father the robot had not once looked back at the desert, only ahead, as if it could already hear the town's pumps working. Her father poured the first cup for the machine, and H-q, having no mouth, let it run down its grey flank in a bright line, which Ida said was the only thanks it ever needed.

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