April 2021 - Bicycles Create Change

30/04/202114/07/2021

@bikeart.gallery makes me happy

I am recovering from a 3-week intensive marking bender.

My eyes are itchy, my lower back aches and my approachablity is incendiary.

A tight uni turnaround to mark 28 x 6,000-word research reports and 28 x 2,000-word workplace assessments (both Masters level and worth 80% of the total course!) PLUS 21 x 3,300-word undergrad mixed-method research reports (worth 50%). Epic!

I am grateful for the work. Like many others, I’ve had no uni teaching or lecturing for Trimeter 1 due to university COVID response measures. No sessional work, only marking. Thank goodness for my educational consultancy. Tough times.

The students worked hard and so did I. There’s a lot riding on these assessments – and I take the job seriously. I’m not the kind of academic who breezes over assessments and gives 3 comments like: good or need more work here and interesting point– what the hell kind of feedback is that? So unhelpful! I am NOT that kind of marker – I hate that shit! So, I put in the work and gave each assessment my full attention.

And now….I am tired.

When I feel like this, I need bike art.

It ALWAYS makes me feel better.

Last time I felt like this, I wrote how @Artcrank makes me happy.

Other bike-inspired artwork that helps are:

Bicycle Murals by Mart Aires
Bike-themed tattoos and Cycle Ink (Part 1)
Walt Cahill’s beautiful Inktober collection of bike-inspired illustrations
Bekka Wright’s comic series Bikeyface
And… 2019 Bicycle-themed Inktober artwork

So in a similar mood for @Artcrank, I looked for a new source to lift the spirits and remind me of the creative playfulness betwixt bikes, community, action, spaces, materiality, bodies and brazenness.

And this time, I found Global @bikeart.gallery on Instagram.

@bikeart.gallery makes me happy

Here is a 100-word worlding I wrote after seeing @bikeart.gallery for the first time.

I love bikeart, too.

Eyes itchy, shoulders aching and approachablity is incendiary. Time for bike art. @bikeart.gallery – newly discovered on Instagram. Stickers, prints, icons, charcoals, photos, cartoons, designs, and paper cuts. I love bikes and I love art, too. Some super progressive bikeart, others not so. Hypersexualized disembodied females with-on bikes (really? still?!) – cringe-worthy. Elsewhere, I marvel at super spunky rider couples, surreal adventure rides, fantastical bici creaturing, and cheeky postmodern velo classical reinterpretations. A few memes. Close-ups, portraits and movement. Audaciousness. Lego, flames, tattoos, air travel, and (Fr)eddie Merxc(ury). @jctdesign’s spontaneous napkin doodle ‘unplug and ride your bike’ is good advice.

Image: @andy_warlord
Image: Rachel aka @rachpetru!
Image: IG @artbike.gallery
Image: @bikeart.gallery
Image: @AlvaroLopeMoralesQuevado
Image: @tadapota
Image: @bikeart.gallery
Image: @bazasportpenza
Image: @josekoebrugge
Image: @abphart
Image:
Image: @hello_mrbaker
Image: IG @artbike.gallery
Image: @daemoncycling
Image: @kosuke_masuda_5
Image: @lbbjkt
Image: @bikeart.gallery
Image: @eila_kai
Image: @davidlgill
Image: “Organic Growth” art installation (umbrellas & bicycle tires) by @izaskunchinchilla (account not longer exists) at Govenor’s Island.
Image: @gracegarciasalcedo
Image: IG @artbike.gallery
Image: @dibuja_y_pedalea
Image: @mitevol
Image: @theolddrifter
Image:
Image: @jctdesign

27/04/202130/06/2021

New Materialisms SIG: Making kin with ocean and coastal ecologies

We are very excited to have Dr. Rebecca Olive as guest presenter for our April NM SIG!

Sport as encounter: Making kin with ocean and coastal ecologies

Rebecca Olive is an ARC DECRA Fellow in the School of Human Movement & Nutrition Sciences at UQ.

Her project, Moving Oceans, examines the role of sport (surfing and ocean swimming) in shaping peoples’ relationships to coastal and ocean ecologies.

See more of Rebecca’s publications here.

This session: Key to addressing human impacts on climate change is changing human demands on ecologies. My project is exploring how participating in ocean sports shapes peoples’ relationships to and knowledge of ecologies, and their ways of thinking about our responsibilities for environmental care (Olive). In particular, this project is aimed at challenging white-settler relationships to place (Kimmerer, Kwaymullina), and the ontologies that underpin how we understand ourselves in relation to the world.

Swimming and surfing remind us in deeply personal ways that we are part of ecologies, not separate from them. This includes learning to make kin (Haraway) with threatening aspects of place and space, such as sharks and various forms of pollution (Tsing).

For this discussion, I have suggested a lot of quite short readings, often from much longer texts. I have also set a recent essay that gives a good overview of my current work. You might not get to them all, but reading across at least a few of them will be helpful.

As part of this meeting, we dicussed: How can we better communicate knowledge with relevant communities and the public?

My session notes and thoughts

Below are two worldings I wrote about this session to give sense of what emerged.

Nature returns revisited

We’re discussing nature revisited and tainted returns. I’m traversing Ecofeminisms and thinking in habit(at)s. ‘Proper’ places. Sarah Jaquette posits climate anxiety is a white-person’s phenomenon. A culture of denial. Our vulnerability offsets our humility. Confusion about Margaret Howe Lovatt and Peter the dolphin’s more-than-pleasurable interspecies relations. People actively speaking about creative connections and kinships beyond family and humanness. Healing traditions. Tsing’s challenge of ‘living in the precarious ruins’. Reassuring exclusionary ethical participation. Hydrofeminisms. Definitions and distinctions between ‘locals’ and ‘imports’. PolesApart. Activists, stewards, custodians, collectors. Val Plumwood resituates humans in ecological terms. Putting humans back on the inside of nature.

Surfing ontological waves

I’m considering Rebecca Olive’s work. Surfing intensities. Reflecting on human impacted climate change and changing human demands on ecologies. Briny netroot polemics. Explorations of environs question peoples’ relationships, knowledge and responsibilities of ecologies and environmental care. Transnatural perspectives. Much needed challenges of white-settler relationships to place and the ontologies of how we understand ourselves and our actions in relation to the world. Moving Oceans. Natural environments affect us in deeply personal ways. Making kin. We are ecologies-with, not ecologies-from. Facing fears. Choices that either support or threaten ourselves, each other, creatures, plants and environments. The benefits of swimming with sharks.

Image: Rebecca Olive
Image: Rebecca Olive
Image: Rebecca Olive
Image: Rebecca Olive
Image: Rebecca Olive
Image: Rebecca Olive
Image: Rebecca Olive
Image: Rebecca Olive

Readings

Olive, R. (2020). Living with sharks, White Horses, 34, available at: https://movingoceans.com/2020/11/26/living-with-sharks/

Haraway, D. J. (2016). Staying with the trouble: Making kin in the Chthulucene. Duke University Press.

Making kin: Anthropocene, capitalocene, plantationocene, chthulucene (pp. 99-103).

Haraway (2016) Making kin in the Chthulucene Download

Kimmerer, R. W. (2013). Braiding sweetgrass: Indigenous wisdom, scientific knowledge and the teachings of plants. Milkweed Editions.

The gift of strawberries, (pp. 22-32).

Kimmer (2018) The gift of strawberries Download

Kwaymullina, A. (2018). You are on Indigenous land: Ecofeminism, Indigenous peoples and land justice. In L. Stevens, P. Tait, & D. Varney (Eds.) Feminist Ecologies (pp. 193-208). Palgrave Macmillan.

Tsing, A. L. (2015). The mushroom at the end of the world: On the possibility of life in capitalist ruins. Princeton University Press.

Prologue: Autumn Aroma (p. 1-9)
Arts of noticing (p. 17-25)

Tsing (2015) Mushroom at end of the world Download

22/04/202124/06/2021

A ‘mind-reading’ e-bike

‘Thought control’ bicycle for spinal injury rehab. Bicycles Create Change.com 16th July, 2019.

Innovative technology is increasingly being applied to bike riding to address some very pressing issues, such as increasing bike participation and rider safety.

Previously I’ve posted on the pioneering work of Griffith researchers working on the world’s first ‘thought-control’ bicycle for spinal injury rehab (see more here). This story details Dr. Dinesh Palipana who is a Griffith University medical graduate. Dinesh became a quadriplegic after a car accident partway through his medical degree. Despite this, Dinesh completed his degree and has since been collaborating with a Griffith research team on the world’s-first integrated neuro-musculoskeletal rehabilitation recline bike that will enable quadriplegics to use ‘thought control’ to ride a specially adapted bike. This project uses ground-breaking 3D computer-simulated biomechanical model, connected to an electroencephalogram (EEG) to capture Dinesh’s brainwaves that then stimulates movement that not only push the pedals for him but also helps revitalise is neuro pathways for eventually recovery.

I recently came across an article written last year by Timna Jacks for the Sydney Morning Herald that looked at a ‘mind-reading- bicycle designed to save lives by improving riders’ safety. I was particularly curious about this article as the researchers were using e-bikes in this case Timna makes links with the unprecedented surge in bike use due to COVID-19 – something we have all noticed. So, if you missed this article, I’ve included it in full below.

A ‘mind-reading’ e-bike. Bicycles Create Change.com. 22nd April 2021.

The ‘mind-reading’ bicycle that could save lives

Cycling in Melbourne might seem a dangerous game, but what if the bike was so intuitive that it could detect when you were in danger and manoeuvre you to safety?

Researchers at Monash University, IBM Australia and the University of Southampton in the UK have invented an e-bicycle which they claim can “read” people’s minds and detect when a cyclist is in danger.

The electroencephalogram-supported e-bike prototype, built by the researchers over more than a year, scans the electrical activity in the cyclist’s brain to detect the nature of the rider’s field of view.

An EEG electrode cap measuring electrical signals in the cyclist’s occipital lobe, the visual processing area of the brain, feeds into a small computer in their backpack, which converts the signals from brain activity to instructions for the bike’s engine.

If the rider’s peripheral vision is narrow – a neurological response when a cyclist detects a danger ahead such as a car cutting them off or an obstruction to a bike path – the bike’s accelerator halts. The cyclist can still move forward by pushing the pedals, albeit more slowly.

Conversely, if the rider has a wide peripheral vision because there is no threat in sight, the bike accelerates.

Changes in peripheral awareness are often linked to a person’s awareness of their surroundings, and their physical performance and co-ordination.

Researchers at Monash, IBM and University of Southampton Josh Andres said cycling accidents often occurred at intersections where cyclists needed a heightened awareness of their environment.

He wanted to find a technology that gave riders extra time in critical situations, but instead of outsourcing this skill, he wanted to build a technology that helped riders connect more with their bodies.

This e-bike, named Ena, would provide a feedback loop for cyclists, enabling them to improve their peripheral vision.

“This is a problem right now. Many of the technologies we are building are teaching us how to outsource how we feel, whereas we should try to be more in touch with our bodies, more in tune with our bodies,” Mr Andres said.

He has previously built e-bikes that connect the bike’s motor to traffic light signals and instruct the cyclist to speed up or slow down.

Monash University researcher Floyd Mueller said the new bike was aimed at boosting people’s confidence in cycling, allowing them to feel in control.

“We know from good cyclists that they talk about how they become one with the bike … what this technology allows is for the cyclist to be an extension of their body. The bike knows when the cyclist is in danger or having fun without being explicitly told.”

Cycling is having an unprecedented surge in popularity because of the COVID-19 lockdown. A Bicycle Network count of 8800 riders on April 25 showed the number had increased by 270 per cent compared with November last year.

But Uber this week confirmed that its shared e-bike outfit Jump would be taken over by Lime and pulled off Melbourne’s streets, in line with similar moves overseas.

The program launched in early March and paused three weeks later as COVID-19 lockdowns began.

It is understood the decision was made in the face of financial strain wrought by the virus, with the company reportedly expected to lay off more than 100 Australian employees as part of its major global job cuts.

18/04/202114/06/2021

‘Ride Nation’: Australian national bike education program for schools

Not many people know about Ride Nation. Ride Nation is a national Australian school-based bike education program designed to get more students on bikes.

Ride Nation is pitched to schools as being ‘a fun and interactive learning experience that teaches young people to develop their riding skills and confidence – supporting kids in their independence and giving parents peace of mind.’

Ride Nation is also a wonderful exemplar of a comprehensive and well-thought bike education program that could be implemented more widely, or modified for different contexts.

The focus of Ride Nation is to improve engagement with physical activity and sport with bicycle riding. The aim here is to shift generational beliefs and behaviours from sedentary and inactive to be more active, happier and healthier. By working in schools, Sport Australia is using bike riding programs to reinforce and emphasise a healthy lifestyle, fundamental movement skills, environmental awareness and physical literacy – all of which are important skills for transitioning through life and into adulthood.

This program not only promotes regular and safe use bicycle riding for students, but also have a robust focus on building the skills and professional development of teachers and adults too. For example, they offer Cycling Australia School Teachers (CAST) and Introductory Skills Instructor (ISI) accredited programs.

Ride Nation website has heaps of links for all levels, types and styles of bike riding. There are links to clubs and providers a coaches community and a finder network.

There is also a Ride Nation blog, which is regularly updated stories of local families riding, ideas on where to go and other useful information.

The Ride Nation website has a ‘download zone’ where you can get free resources to get kids started with bike riding, a good load of teacher resources to help extend learnings from the courses, and coach resources to help assist with connecting and delivering these programs. These resources are well worth a look for anyone who has young kids learning to ride.

Ride Nation in-school bike progams develop key skills such as:

Movement and mobility skills

This program is 6 x 1-hour sessions. The focus here is on foundational bike handling skills. Using a game-sense/experience approach students are able to practice: riding in a straight line, riding through a salem course, riding slowly and in control, emergency braking, scanning (looking) left and right, standing and pedalling, and precision braking.

Confidence and hazard perception

This program develops rider situational awareness and response to the moving environment. This program has a mix of classroom content and riding activities so student-riders can understand, identify and respond to different hazards, such as bike control skills, precision maneuvering, signalling, scanning traffic/hazards, hazard perception, and entering roadways.

Exploring places

Where the previous sessions have a focus on road safety and skills, these final two sessions, Explore Places focus on riding opportunities in local communities. The core competencies in this module are: safe route planning and risk assessment, riding in groups, riding of active transportation and riding with other roads users.

I’d love to see Ride Nation being enshrined in the national curriculum of all Australian schools – after all, riding a bike is an essential life skill everyone should learn!

If you haven’t heard of Ride Nation before – check it out.

If you have kids in school or are a teacher – consider getting your school involved.

It is never too early to be safe and confident on a bike!

Happy riding all!

All images from Ride Nation

14/04/202111/06/2021

ICQI 2021 Accepted! Velo-onto-epistemology: Becoming(s)-with Bicycles, Gender, Education and Research

ICQI 2021: Collaborative Futures in Qualitative Inquiry

ICQI…..you know….only the largest ……. and most respected qualitative research conference IN THE WORLD! … and with all the biggest names!

My PhD supervisor said I should consider submitting an abstract for this conference.

Doing so is a VERY BIG DEAL – this congress is the pinnacle in my field. I’ve never presented at this conference.

For the first time ever, the ICQI 2021 will be held online. This is a super attractive feature for me as it will mean if I get an abstract accepted to present, I wouldn’t have to spend the extra money to travel to the USA as was required for all previous (and probably subsequent) ICQIs. If I ever wanted to give ICQI a solid shot – this is it!

So I did – and my abstract got accepted! Woohoo!

My ICQI 2021 Abstract

Velo-onto-epistemology: Becoming(s)-with Bicycles, Gender, Education and Research.
This paper traces some experimental and experiential wonderings of researching gendered journeys on bicycles in West Africa. This session shares what is unfolding for one rider-researcher as she works to excavate the entanglements, tensions and possibilities of becoming(s)-with post-qualitative inquiry that foregrounds African landscapes, smells, desires, dynamics, beliefs, practices and peoples with emerging feminist posthuman ontologies. My research puts to work feminist New Materialisms to explore how bicycles feature in West African girls’ access to secondary education. This undertaking is bold, complex and unsettling. It requires (re)turning (Barad, 2006) and challenging habitual preoccupations about bicycles, embodiment, movement, identity, ecology, sp/pl/p/ace and methodology. There is much about gendered bodies navigating trails that commands attention, yet defies explanation (McLure, 2013). Drawing on key encounters experienced in Brisbane (Australia) and Lunsar (Sierra Leone), I trace the skills, wills, spills and thrills from which a velo-onto-epistemology is emerging.

Below are some ICQI 2021 details to get a sense of what’s on offer.

The 2021 Congress theme is: Collaborative Futures in Qualitative Inquiry.

The rapidly changing social, cultural, political, economic, and technological dynamics brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic are inescapable as we endeavor to move forward. The pandemic has also amplified hard truths about everyday life: the ongoing historical devaluation of teachers, nurses, and service workers, and the precarity of the working classes, the unyielding privileging of business and the free market as the answer to all social and health ills, the differential experience of the virus relative to race, class, and gender dynamics, including as related to co-morbidity and mortality rates, access to care, and visibility, the rise of right-wing populism and its deleterious impact on positive governmental responses to pandemic conditions, the prominence of conspiracy theories in mainstream and social media discourse (e.g., masks don’t help, virus is man-made, etc.).

At the same time, we cannot overlook the broader context in which the 2021 Congress will take place: Black Lives Matter, #MeToo creeping authoritarianism, environmental crises, economic shocks to higher education and continuing public health crises.

Collectively and collaboratively, this moment calls for a critical, performative, social justice inquiry directed at the multiple crises of our historical present.

We need a rethinking of where we have been, and, critically, where we are going.

We cannot go at it alone.

We need to imagine new ways to collaborate, to engage in research and activism. New ways of representing and intervening into the historical present. New ways to conduct research, and a rethinking of in whose interest our research benefits.

Sessions in the 2021 Congress will take up these topics, as well as those related to and/or utilizing:

feminist inquiry
Critical Race Theory
intersectionality
queer theory
critical disability research
phenomenology
Indigenous methodologies
postcolonial and decolonized knowing
poststructural engagements
diffraction and intra-action
digital methodologies
autoethnography
visual methodologies
thematic analysis
performance
art as research
critical participatory action research
multivocality
collaborative inquiry
………..and the politics of evidence.

Sessions will also discuss:

threats to shared governance
attacks on freedom of speech
public policy discourse
and research as resistance

Scholars come to the Congress to resist, to celebrate community, to experiment with traditional and new methodologies, with new technologies of representation.

Together we seek to develop guidelines and exemplars concerning advocacy, inquiry and social justice concerns. We share a commitment to change the world, to engage in ethical work that makes a positive difference.

As critical scholars, our task is to bring the past and the future into the present, allowing us to engage realistic utopian pedagogies of hope.

ICQI provides leadership to demonstrate the promise of qualitative inquiry as a form of democratic practice, to show how qualitative inquiry can be used to directly engage pressing social issues at the level of local, state, national and global communities.

The Congress sponsors the journal International Review of Qualitative Research (IRQR), three book series, and occasional publications based upon the more than 1,000 papers given at the conference each year. It the largest annual gathering of qualitative scholars in the world.

09/04/202111/06/2021

Bikes and Sport-for-development (S4D)

Bikes and Sport-for-development. Bicycles Create Change.com. 9th April 2021.

My PhD looks at how bicycles feature in West African girls’ access to secondary education.

This means I read widely about gender, geography, aid and development, education, mobility and innovative research methods.

I’ve been reviewing what has been done so far to help girls get to and from schools on bikes – and this has to lead me to Sport-for-development literature. Which I love!

The field of sport-for-development (S4D) has received significant attention in the last 10 years, legitimizing it as a recognized and critical new genre of scholarship and praxis. The focus of S4D is to engage disadvantaged people and communities in physical activity projects with an overarching aim of achieving various social, cultural, physical, economic, or health outcomes.

Where at the beginning of the 21st century it was difficult to find projects that use sport or physical activity as a specific vehicle for positive change, the number of S4D initiatives that aim to make a difference has grown substantially. One explanation for this escalation is the strong political support for a movement that combines sports associations, aid agencies, development bodies, sponsoring organisations, and non-governmental organisations (NGOs)under a single umbrella.

An example of this is my project, which showcases how for the last decade, the collaboration of NGO Village Bicycle Project (my research partner organization) with Stylish Karim Kamara has helped progress local individuals, schools, community groups and education/health organisations by supplying bicycles and bike riding services.

A lovely moment of (research) providence

Often in research, what is being worked on is removed and abstracted from the goings-on in ‘the real-world’.

But not for me this week! This week I had a lovely moment of research providence!

I am currently reading a book on S4D (see image above) which details programs like Football for Peace in the Middle East, Ganar and Deportes para la Vida in the Caribbean, Soldados Nunca Mais which rehabilitates and retrains Brasilian child soldiers using sport, Pacifica Wokabot Jalens (team-based step challenges) programs and other EduSport initiatives.

And it just so happened that my reading of this book coincided with the UN International Day of Sport for Development and Peace (IDSDP 2021) which was on the 6th of April.

So this made what I am working on even more real and meaningful.

What is the International Day of Sport for Development and Peace?

Here are some great IDSDP resources and information.

Here’s some background from the UN explaining IDSDP 2021.

In recognition of the positive contribution that sport can have on the realization of sustainable development and on the advancement of human rights, 6 April was proclaimed the International Day of Sport for Development and Peace (IDSDP) by the UN General Assembly in its resolution 67/296 in 2013.

Theme: International Day of Sport for Development and Peace (IDSDP) 2021

The International Day of Sport for Development and Peace 2021 there is an opportunity to recognize the role that sport plays in communities, in individuals’ lives, in building resilience and in the recovery from the pandemic through online and social media activity in the lead up to and on the Day.

The Department of Global Communications, in collaboration with DESA, WHO and the co-chairs of the Group of Friends of Sport for Sustainable Development in New York – Qatar and Monaco – have developed social media and online messaging around the theme of recovery from the pandemic, the importance of equity in that recovery, and what is necessary to build back better for a more resilient and equitable world.

Sport can cross boundaries, defy stereotypes, improve our physical and emotional health, and inspire hope across nations, but we will only be able to get back to this, if we recover better and help end the pandemic by helping ensure everyone is protected from COVID-19 Using the hashtags #SportDay and #OnlyTogether, interested UN entities and external organizations will be able to tailor the theme to closely fit their own specific mandates and activities to demonstrate how sport and physical activity can help build back better and stronger as society begins to reopen and recover, once the pandemic ends.

Sporting analogies, such as “achieving success through teamwork,” and “using a level playing field” can also be incorporated to deliver the important equity and resilience messaging, and sports personalities and organizations can help promote. Teamwork is essential to building back better.

So, let’s help end the pandemic by ensuring everyone is protected from COVID-19. Let’s level the playing field and recover better. #OnlyTogether will we play again.

Objectives

The 2021 International Day of Sport for Development and Peace aims to:

– Reaffirm the place of sport in the recovery from the pandemic and beyond
– Foster equity, solidarity, community and team spirit in response to the pandemic
– Encourage healthy habits through physical activity and building emotional wellbeing
– and inspire hope through sporting analogies.

These are the hashtags for the International Day of Sport this year: #SportDay #OnlyTogether

05/04/202110/06/2021

Some ‘wheelie’ specific bike tattoos

This blog is no stranger to bicycle tattoos.

In earlier posts, I have looked at:

In this post, we are looking at a very specific subset of bike tattoo and that is – bike tattoos that have specifically detailed colour or design included in the bike wheels … or what I call … ‘wheelie’ specific bike tattoos.

I scoured the internet and rolled through hundreds of cool, funny and (at times) questionable bike tattoos to find 5 solid representations of tattoos that have details in the bike wheels as their central focus.

In each of these cases, colour and form was used as the central cohesive design feature.

Let’s have a look…

Some 'wheelie' specific bike tattoos. Bicycles Create Change.com. 5th April 2021. — @Mountainbike on Pintrest

The first two tattoos (see above) have a similar aesthetic which uses a sunset or landscape scenery as the key motif. I put two versions of this design here as the gentle difference in colours has quite a significant impact on the ‘feel’ of the overall tattoo, yet the symbolism is equally clear and meaningful. Having mountains on the side and a river or track running through the middle helps accentuate the perspective of the ‘never-ending great outdoors’ so desired by bike riders. This iconography is made all the more striking when contained within the circular frame of both wheels which (also) forms a simple black bike frame silhouette with no background. Interestingly, I sourced both these tattoos from the same location, which makes me wonder if this specific design is ‘a mountainbike thang.’

The third tattoo (above) is more of a whimsical, flowery bike design interpretation made more impactful with the use of the two strongly contrasting and complementary colors of blue and red. This is an unsual and particular tattoo that stands out for its unconventional and creative design – a bold choice for a permanent tattoo!

The fourth tattoo (above) is a calf single wheel tattoo highlighted by the distinctive red and black diagrammatic colouring that really makes it pop. This tattoo is dramatic in its almost tribal-style patterning. The composition is controlled, yet creative with clean and authoritative lines that clearly accentuate the ‘wheel-ness’ of the design. The strong outlines are offset by the red 5-petaled flower at the centre of the wheel, hinting to the softer interior of the ‘hard-wheeled’ rider-owner who is bold enough to wear it.

The last tattoo (above) looks like it takes its cue from graphic design using both colour, texture and geometric patterning to good effect. On closer inspection, it almost looks like the texture of puff paints (it did make me second guess whether this was a ‘real’ tattoo) or maybe the tattoo had just been applied and was brand new, hence the raised (or skin reactive) beveling of work.

Tattoos – and more specifically bike tattoos – are not for everyone. But there are many people who love riding and want to celebrate, share and commemorate bikes with tattoos. And these ‘wheelie’ bike tattoos are just one example of people do this.

Which begs the question:

If you were to get a bike tattoo, where and what would you get?