Full-colour flash design of a chrome piston flanked by two skulls, crossed rusty wrenches, spark plugs and lightning, with no body placement shown.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Skulls, crossed wrenches and piston design

Colour · Flash

A central chrome piston sits behind two crossed wrenches with flame-patterned handles and rusty heads, with a skull on each side. Two spark plugs rise from the bottom centre, and blue lightning arcs between the skulls. The shading is smooth and glossy with bright highlights on the metal and skulls, and the composition is symmetrical and centred.

Piston Skull Lightning Engine

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Len, the Norton is running again, though it fought me all week. The piston came out of the barrel with a crust of carbon across its crown like a burnt loaf, and Dad's old wrenches, the ones he filed the flame pattern into, wouldn't sit true on the nuts until I'd soaked them in paraffin overnight and cursed them into the morning.

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Mrs Okafor from the chip shop brought round a wireless that hums and asked if I could make it sing. I told her the valves were beyond saving and the set was older than both of us. She paid me anyway, counting out coppers across the bench one by one, and I've kept the threepenny bit because it's the only thing in the tin older than the shed.

I gapped the plugs to thirty thousandths the way Dad showed us, fitted the leads, and stood back with my hand on the kick-start. The thing coughed, caught, and for a second the whole shed flashed blue, sparks jumping between the electrodes as if they were trying to reach each other across the gap. Then it settled into a lumpy idle that rattled the tools on the pegboard. I laughed out loud on my own like a fool.

Your skull joke is still hanging on the back door, by the way. I haven't taken it down. I'm not asking you to come home. I'm only telling you the engine runs, and that you can hear it from the lane if you stand by the gate at seven tomorrow. I'll leave the choke out for you. Kit.