A gloved hand holds a black and red tattoo machine while working on a dark tattoo on a client's arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Tattooing in progress with a rotary machine

Black and grey · Photo

A gloved hand grips a tattoo machine with a black grip, brass fittings and a red coil, while the needle works on the skin. The darker tattooed skin of the client's arm fills the lower and background areas, and the shallow focus blurs the surroundings. The image is dominated by dark tones and muted greys, with the red coil as the only strong colour.

Tattoo machine Skin Needle

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nan kept the machine in a biscuit tin under the stairs, wrapped in a tea towel that smelled of paraffin and Sunday roast. She never let me touch it until I could tell a liner from a shader by the sound alone, and even then it was the brass she wanted me to look after first. The fittings had gone the colour of weak tea, and the red coil she had wound herself from a reel of wire she bought off a man at Scarborough market, who swore it had come off a trawler's winch.

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The summer I turned sixteen, the shop on Carr Lane went quiet, and Mr Oduya, who had been doing the lettering on the front window since before I was born, sent word that he needed someone to finish the anchor on a sailor's forearm before the man shipped out on the Tuesday tide. Nan put the tin in my lap on the bus. 'Don't pinch the skin,' she said. 'Let the needle do its own work and keep your wrist loose, the way you'd hold a teacup you didn't want to break.'

The sailor didn't talk. He watched the machine the whole way through, the way some men watch a kettle, and when I lifted the needle away to wipe the line he said the coil sounded like a hive. I said it was my nan's. He nodded as if that settled something. When I finished, the anchor sat black and clean above the wrist bone, and the red coil ticked quietly on the tray beside the ink caps.

Nan was waiting at the door when I got home. She didn't ask about the anchor. She took the machine out of my hands, turned the brass screw a quarter turn, and said that was the first honest line I'd ever drawn. I still don't know whether she meant the tattoo or the way I'd folded the tea towel, but I've wound my own coil since, and I keep the tin where she kept it.