Streamlined retro car on a forearm

Dotwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A streamlined, vintage-style car in side profile, with a rounded nose, teardrop body and exposed wheels, is tattooed across the forearm. The outlines are crisp and solid, while the body and wheel arches are built up with dense stippled dots that create soft shading. Highlights are left as bare skin along the roofline and bodywork, and the image has a plain black background.

Dotwork Forearm Car Vehicle Wheel

Find an artist for this

Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, the lot of you, or the wind off the firth will take half of it. You see that gap in the curtain wall, past the nettles? Under the ivy beyond it there's a shape the moss has been trying to swallow since before your grandmothers were born. It's no cart and no cannon. It's a car, long as a barge and shaped like a dropped tear, with a nose as round as a pudding.

Keep reading

Irene Platt drove it up from the Coventry works in the summer of 1938, with a stopwatch and a bet on her brother's garage. She meant to beat a time on the flats below the keep before the tide turned. But the lane gave out at these gates, and a sea fog came rolling up the cliff so thick she couldn't see her own bonnet. She sat in that little cockpit with the engine ticking as it cooled, and she listened to the gulls that she could not see, and she waited for the sky to lift.

It lifted at dawn, and the flats were gone under the water. The race had been run without her, the way races always are. Irene took one long look at the grey sea, wiped the glass with her sleeve, and said she'd come back when the tide went out. She never did, but the car stayed where she parked it, and it has been waiting ever since.

Every spring the moss creeps higher over those great round wheels, and every spring my old father would hand me a torch and tell me to check the stopwatch on the dash. It was always running, he said. Just a little slow.