Black and grey realistic tattoo of a vintage car front with a grille and headlights, placed centrally on the stomach above the navel.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Vintage car front tattoo on the stomach

Realism · Other · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows the front of a vintage-style car, including a vertical grille, round headlights, a curved windscreen and a bumper. The linework is clean, and smooth grey shading and highlights give the bodywork a glossy, metallic appearance. It sits centrally on the abdomen above the navel, with blue fabric framing the sides of the image.

Realism Other Car

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You are on the quay at Birkenhead before six, a rag in your back pocket and the owner already gone off to find a taxi. The car is a 1951 two-door saloon, black as wet slate, with a split grille that grins like a row of bared teeth and headlamps that stare straight at you. Mr Abbott has paid to have it crated, lashed and shipped to Lagos, and the foreman has given the job to you because you are the only one who can be trusted not to scratch the chrome.

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The ship is the Maren Dove, three weeks of grey water ahead. You work in hold four with a torch, tightening the straps and listening to the hull groan around you. Every night you sit on an upturned crate beside the car and wipe the salt off its bumper, because the air down there is thick enough to bloom rust on anything that holds still. You begin to talk to it the way you talk to a horse, and you are not ashamed of that.

Off Finisterre the storm finds you. Water pours down the hatch and the lamp swings wildly, throwing the shadow of the grille up the bulkhead like a fanged mouth. You wedge yourself between the bumper and the wall, your palm pressed to the cold metal, and you feel the whole ship shudder through it. The windscreen catches the lamp and holds it steady. The straps hold too.

In Port Harcourt they hand you an envelope with your wages and a photograph taken on the quay, the car gleaming in afternoon light with a crowd of boys around its wings. You fold the picture into your breast pocket and take it out again on the train home. Its grille looks as if it is still grinning, pleased with the crossing. Your thumbprint of salt is still on the bumper, and you suspect it always will be.