Watercolour-style roller coaster track tattoo across a person's upper back and shoulder, with teal and pink washes and black ink drips.

Roller coaster track across a back and shoulder

Back · Mixed · Photo

A roller coaster track curves from the shoulder across the upper back, with a lattice of supports drawn in fine black linework beneath it. Soft teal, pink and orange washes spread behind the track, and heavy black ink drips and splashes anchor the lower and right sides of the design. The composition sweeps diagonally across the skin, with the hair pulled up and out of the frame.

Back Shoulder Watercolour Splash Ink drip

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The night the big wheel stalled over the car park, Dessa was the only one on the Cyclone who didn't scream. Her father always said that was the trouble with her. He ran the Hooting Owl stall at Ashby Gala for thirty-one summers and he could tell a bad bolt from the sound of a sigh in the rails. He had taught me to read steel that way, and I suppose I read her the same.

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We were the ones who went up the ladders at dawn with the grease tins. The track was a long pale ribbon that bent over the playing fields like something lazy, and the supports stood in their criss-cross lattice like a stack of unfinished kites. Dessa liked to walk the lattice with her eyes shut. She said the joints hummed if you were quiet enough, and that the pink paint on the spine of the first hill had come from a van that had once run a strawberry ice stall, so the whole coaster tasted faintly of sugar in the wind.

The week the inspector came, somebody had painted a black splash across the ticket booth in the night, a great spilt inkwell with drips running down the wood. Dessa looked at it for a long time and then laughed and said it was the best thing anyone had made on that fairground in years. We never found out who did it. We kept the booth as it was. By September the drips had dried to a shine, and the coaster ran its last loop with the lights on and the whole town watching from the grass, and Dessa, hands in the air, was the only one who didn't close her eyes.