Black and grey sleeve tattoo on an upper arm and forearm, showing skulls, dice, pistons, playing cards, flames and a motorcycle engine, shown from three angles.

Skull, dice and engine full arm sleeve

Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A three-panel photograph of a full arm sleeve covering the upper arm and forearm. The design includes skulls, a pair of dice, pistons, playing cards, a dollar sign on a skull, flames and a motorcycle engine. The shading is smooth and grey with heavy black areas behind the flames and engine, and the photos are taken from different angles.

Upper arm Forearm Skull Dice Piston Playing card Flame Engine Dollar sign Sleeve

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Walter Pyle kept the only garage in Haddon Cross, and on Saturday nights he kept the back room too, where the men who had sold their wages to him came to lose them at dice. Nobody in the village asked where the money went. Walter's pistons were always true and his bench lamp burned until dawn, and that was enough for them.

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One March a stranger rode in on a black Triumph with a knock in the crankcase like a fist on a coffin lid. He wanted it fixed by morning and a game by night. Walter stripped the engine under the lamp, laid the four pistons out on the oilcloth, and showed him the scoring on each one. "Your rings are gone," he said. "Nothing's gone that can't be bet on," the stranger said, and set down a deck of cards with a skull printed on the back.

They played until the church clock struck two. Walter lost the pumps, then the tools his father had left him, then the deed to the yard. The stranger leaned back and tapped the felt with a silver dollar, and said the debt could be cleared by one last throw of the dice and a ride south at first light, with no coming back. Walter took the dice in his palm. They were warm, as if someone else had held them all night. He threw. Six and six.

He rode out with the sun coming up grey over the fields. By noon the village had worked out what it meant: the garage door stood open, the lamp still burning on the bench, and beside it the old engine turning over by itself, one clean beat after another, as if nobody had ever told it to stop.