Black and grey realistic tattoo of a vintage car with a chrome grille and white-walled tyre, placed on the inner upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Vintage car on the inner upper arm

Realism · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A realistic tattoo of a classic open-topped saloon car seen from the front three-quarter angle, with a chrome radiator grille, round headlamps, a bumper and a number plate reading 1953. The shading is smooth and finely graded, with bright highlights on the chrome and a soft dark shadow beneath the vehicle that gives it depth. The design is set against a faint grey wash in an oval shape and is entirely in black ink and greys.

Realism Upper arm Car Wheel

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

Hal Brennan had the car towed out of the scrapyard on a Tuesday, because the man who owned the yard said it would cost less to bury it than to fix it. The grille was still bright under the dust, and the number plate said 1953 in letters someone had painted by hand. Hal was fourteen and had never been further than the county line, but he knew the road that ran south across the flats to Tenmile Well, and he knew that a car that old could not be stopped by sand, only by a man who lost his nerve.

Keep reading

They went at dusk, when the heat lifted off the tarmac in sheets. The headlamps were cracked but still threw a yellow circle that rolled ahead of them like something alive. Every few miles a jackrabbit ran into the light and stopped, staring, and Hal lifted one hand from the wheel to it, the way his grandfather had taught him to greet strangers on a long road.

At Tenmile Well the windmill had been dead for twenty years. A woman sat on the step of the filling station with a tin cup, and she looked at the car a long time before she spoke. "Your grandfather drove this," she said. Hal had not known that. She told him the old man had carried a crate of oranges across the flats in 1953, sold them for the price of a spare tyre, and never once let the engine idle in the sun. Hal asked why nobody had ever mentioned it. She shrugged and poured the last of her water into the radiator, which was the only thing the car had ever been thirsty for.

Hal drove home at first light with the plate ticking against the bumper. He kept the window down so the road could say its piece, and for once it said nothing at all.