Traditional style colour tattoo of a grey skull fused with a metal engine part with gold trim and blue accents, on an arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Skull and engine part on an arm

Traditional · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A grey skull with black outlines and bold shading sits beneath a cylindrical mechanical part with gold trim and a small blue highlight. The skull's teeth and eye sockets are shaded in grey, and the gold pipe-like elements add warm tones. The tattoo fills the centre of the frame against a dark background, with a small patch of skin visible at the edges.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit yourselves down, the lot of you, and mind the coal dust on that bench. You'll want to hear about the winding engine at Hollin Pit, the one the men called the Bellows, because it was the Bellows that took Jack Ormerod's temper off him and gave him back a better one.

Keep reading

The engine had a steam cylinder as tall as a chapel door, and in the winter of ninety-one it began to knock. Every shift the cage stopped halfway up the shaft, and the banksman would shout down the pipe for Jack. Jack was a fitter with grease to his elbows and no patience for anybody who said the machine was haunted. He took the cylinder cap off himself, with the brass gauge still clipped to its rim, and found a cast-iron skull bolted inside the steam chamber, grinning up at him out of the dark. Some long-dead founder had put it there for luck, or for a joke, and the knocking was the piston catching on its jaw.

Jack laughed until he wept, then he filed the jaw smooth, polished the gold trim the men had been too frightened to touch, and set a blue glass bead in the gauge so the skull would have an eye to look out of. The cage ran true that night, and every night after.

Nobody at Hollin ever called the Bellows haunted again, though the lads still touched their caps when they walked past it, and Jack never once took his own cap off in its shadow.

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