Realistic colour tattoo of a tachometer dial breaking through torn, bloody skin on the upper arm, with numbers 0 to 8 and x1000 r/min visible.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Tachometer bursting through torn skin

Realism · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

The tattoo shows two tachometer dials with needles and numbered scales, set into a tear in the skin that reveals red flesh and streaks of blood. The gauges, needles and bezels are rendered in black, grey and white with smooth shading that gives them depth, while the surrounding skin and tissue use deep reds and pinks. The design fills the upper arm and shoulder area, with the dials sitting centrally and the torn edges running out across the skin.

Realism Upper arm Dial Needle Torn skin Blood

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The band at the Lyceum Ballroom has the tempo up to a gallop by the time you reach the car park, and you can still feel it in your heels. Eddie has the Anglia's bonnet propped and a torch clamped in his teeth, listening to the engine the way other men listen to the wireless. You slide into the passenger seat and watch the dial glow green on the dashboard, the needle lying flat at nought while he pulls the choke out.

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He takes the lanes out past the gasworks too fast, because you asked him to, because you wanted to see the needle climb. Four thousand. Five. Each number on the scale ticks past like a partner you have already forgotten. Your mother's voice is in your head, the one that says a girl who counts revs on a Saturday will be counting something else by Christmas. You laugh, and then the laughing stops, because a rut in the road kicks the back wheel sideways and the dash lurches and something in the metal gives.

It is not the dashboard that splits. It is the evening itself, the cheap satin of it peeling back, and through the tear you can see both dials sitting in the wet red of the road as if they had always been there underneath. Eddie's needle swings to the red line and stays. The silence after the engine cuts is enormous. He turns to you with the torch still in his teeth, and you realise he is waiting for you to say the next line, the way the caller waits at the end of a set.

You reach across and put your hand over his. The needle is still trembling. 'Keep it at six,' you say, 'just until we reach the hall.' He laughs, and the sound is ragged, and the engine catches on the second try. Behind you the gasworks flares orange, and the dials keep counting, steady as a drummer, all the way back to the lights.