Colour traditional style sleeve tattoo on an arm showing a Route 66 sign, a red heart with an engine, a chequered flag, a flaming hot rod, playing cards, dice and a lighter.

Route 66 and hot rod sleeve on forearm

Traditional · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A full sleeve of hot rod and road-trip motifs covers the arm, including a Route 66 shield, a red heart with engine parts, a chequered flag and a flaming hot rod. Playing cards, an eight ball, dice with skulls and a flaming lighter sit among the bold outlines and shading. Bright reds, oranges and teals dominate against a mottled teal and orange background, and the image is taken at a slight angle with a blurred backdrop.

Traditional Forearm Heart Engine Flame Playing card Dice Skull Star

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Pull your collar up and come under the awning, because the rain has never once stopped over this market and I gave up expecting it to years ago. Sit where you can see the Route 66 shield. My grandfather hung that sign over his stall the week the lorries came back from America, and it has dripped on every Saturday since.

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Now, there was a lad called Dennis Oakley who came up from Kent with a Ford he had rebuilt from scrap. The engine had a red heart for a valve cover, he swore, and it beat hard enough to scatter the pigeons. He wanted to race the fishmonger's van from the car park to the gate, and he bet everything in his pockets on it. An ace of spades, two dice that had rolled skulls three times running, and a brass lighter his father had carried through the war.

The race was a shambles. Flames licked out of the back of the car as it skidded past the eight ball stall, and the lighter tumbled from his hand and caught the canvas. The whole market stood still in the wet to watch. Dennis didn't win the race. Instead he tore the chequered tarpaulin off the flag stall and beat the fire flat with it, shouting like a man who had never once been afraid of anything.

When the smoke cleared, the ace of spades was lying face up in a puddle, perfectly dry under a single drop of rain. Nobody picked it up. My grandfather said that card still turns over every Saturday, if you look at the water long enough.