Black and grey tattoo of a turbocharger over two crossed wrenches on the upper back, near the shoulder blade.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Turbocharger and crossed wrenches on upper back

Back · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows a turbocharger viewed at an angle, with its compressor housing and intake pipe drawn in detail. Two open-ended wrenches cross behind it in a skull-and-crossbones arrangement. The work uses black and grey shading with highlights on the metal surfaces to give the parts a three-dimensional, polished look.

Back Metal

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

Frost had the yard gate frozen shut again, so Dessa climbed over it with the turbo wrapped in a feed sack under one arm. The old Massey had been wheezing since Boxing Day, coughing black smoke up the lane whenever her father pushed it past half throttle, and nobody on Hallow Farm would say it aloud, but the whine from the housing had changed pitch. A turbo doesn't die quietly. It spins itself apart.

Keep reading

She laid it on the workbench beside the paraffin heater and shook the sack off. Her grandfather had bolted the compressor casing on in 1979 and never once cleaned the intake, and the blades inside were furred with soot like a chimney brush. Her father watched from the doorway with his hands deep in his coat. "Can you save it or not," he said, which was how he said please.

She reached for the spanners. Two open-ended wrenches, a 13 and a 17, worn bright at the jaws from forty years of knuckles. The bolts came loose one at a time, stiff with rust, and each one rang on the bench like a small bell. By four o'clock the light had gone blue in the window and the heater ticked, and she had the shaft turning clean under her thumb, a thin hiss of air that sounded almost like breathing.

She bolted it back on in the dark, torch clamped in her teeth. When her father finally turned the key the Massey caught, coughed once, and ran smooth as a kettle. He said nothing. He just took the wrench from her hand, hung it on its nail, and stood a while longer in the cold with the yard lamp buzzing overhead.