Colour tattoo on an upper arm and shoulder showing a winged eyeball, pinstriping, flames and a red hot rod in a traditional style.

Winged eyeball and hot rod on upper arm

Traditional · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A winged eyeball sits above red pinstriped scrollwork, with yellow flames and clouds behind it. Below, a red hot rod with a large engine and spoked wheel fills the lower half of the upper arm, with bold black outlines and shading on the metal. Bright red, yellow and blue ink dominate against the grey and black outlines, and the design wraps across the shoulder.

Traditional Neo-trad Upper arm Shoulder Wing Car Flame Cloud Engine Wheel

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The eyeball had been Hetty's idea, painted on the tailboard of the Deuce the week her husband stopped speaking to her, and by the time the car rolled onto the salt at Carrow Flats nobody could say whether it watched the road or the ground. Jack Pruett wanted it scraped off. Hetty said a car needed something that could see where it was going.

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They ran her at six in the morning, before the heat lifted the air into wobbling sheets. The flames on the fenders were yellow lacquer that had gone tacky overnight, and the pinstripes had been laid out freehand with a sable brush, red, then blue, then black, so the lines fanned up the bonnet like wire. Jack pushed the car to the start line with his palm flat on the roof. Behind him the sky was the colour of a bruise going yellow at the edges.

The starter dropped his flag. The engine took the first mile in a roar that shook grit off the tyres and sent a flock of gulls up from the mud at the far shore, which Hetty swore afterwards were the same gulls that had followed them from Mersea. At the half-mile marker the painted flames seemed to lift off the metal. She kept her foot still and her eyes on the white nothing ahead, and when the car crossed the timing lights she did not look at the dial at all. She looked at the eye, with its little coloured curl at the centre that she had always thought of as a wink.

The number went up in chalk on the wall of the diner that evening, and Jack bought the first round without being asked. He never said sorry, and he never painted over the eye. When the Deuce was finally sold, the new owner asked what the thing on the tailboard was supposed to be, and Hetty told him it was the part of the car that had already seen the finish line.