Colour tattoo of a sugar skull with bicycle wheel eyes, a red sawtooth halo and two lines of lettering, on the thigh, in a neo-traditional style.

Sugar skull with bicycle eyes on a thigh

Neo-trad · Thigh · Colour · Photo

A sugar skull with bicycle wheels for eyes and a bicycle frame across the brow, set within a red sawtooth halo that has small gear shapes at its sides. The lines "Sweat dries, blood clots, bones heal" and "Suck it up and pedal faster" arc above and below the skull in black lettering. Black outlines are filled with pink, teal and yellow, and the design covers a broad area of the upper leg.

Neo-trad Thigh Sugar skull Skull Bicycle Wheel Gear Lettering Quote

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The hill road above Vellamont had eleven hairpins, and by the ninth Osric Wend could taste iron. Behind him the valley bells were ringing for the dead, as they did every autumn, and the whole village had climbed to the chapel steps to watch the old race finish. Nobody had won it in forty years. The sign at the summit was painted with a grinning white skull, its cheeks rouged red, and beneath it ran the words his grandmother had stitched on the banner: sweat dries, blood clots, bones heal.

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His chain skipped on the twelfth turn. He swore, shifted, and the bicycle lurched forward. Ahead, a thin figure in a dusty cap was pedalling without looking back, the wheels of his machine turning like two lit windows. Osric knew that rider. Everyone in Vellamont did. Tobias Carrow had died on this road the winter before the war, and the village had buried him with a cap and a spoke of silver in his hands.

Osric stood on the pedals. His thighs burned, his lungs were full of gravel, and the old saying rang in his head louder than the bells: suck it up and pedal faster. He no longer heard it as a joke. He heard it as the only instruction left to him.

He crested the summit a length behind the ghost, and the chapel doors swung open. The dead rider had gone, leaving only a bicycle leaning against the wall, its wheels still ticking as they cooled. Osric dismounted, bent over his knees, and laughed until the village came down the steps to touch his shoulders.