Detailed grey vintage bicycle tattoo with small coloured roses along its base, on the inner forearm near the wrist, in a realism style.

Vintage bicycle and roses on a forearm

Realism · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A detailed vintage bicycle with a high seat, handlebars and spoked wheels is tattooed on the inner forearm, with the rear wheel near the wrist. Fine shading in grey and black gives the frame and wheels a drawn, engraved look. A row of pink, red and small blue flowers sits beneath the wheels in softer colour against the pale background of the arm.

Realism Botanical Forearm Bicycle Rose Flower Wheel

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mrs Ada Pryce had counted the spokes twice before she let Hester take the bicycle out past the last cottage, and she counted them again when the girl came back muddy to the knee with the postbag still buckled across her chest. Thirty-six on the back wheel, thirty-six on the front. Hester had heard it so often that the numbers came out of her mouth on the long hill past Coldharbour Wood, a small chant to keep the pedals turning.

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The wood stood at the lane's edge like a row of people waiting to be asked in. Hester rode the bend under the oaks with her hands loose on the bars and the roses her mother had tied there swinging against the front wheel, pink and red, bruising at the petals with every bump. The bag never weighed much. Some days there was only one letter for the Hollins farm and a packet of seed for the vicar, but she carried them all the same, because the road out of Wenlow was the only thing in the parish that went anywhere.

The letter that mattered came on a Thursday in March, in a hand she knew from the brass plate on a Portsmouth office door. Her brother had signed the papers that made him a man of the railway, and he wrote only to say the bicycle was hers to sell or keep. She sat on the verge with the front wheel ticking as it cooled and read the line twice, the way her mother counted spokes, until the words lost their edges.

She rode home without hurrying. At the gate she untied the roses and laid them on the bench by the back door, and told her mother the back wheel was true. Ada looked at the old hub, at the maker's name worn to a grey shadow, and said nothing at all. In the morning Hester pushed the bicycle back up the lane towards the wood, and this time she left the bag on its hook.