Bike Shop: Triumph T shirts

The winged skull symbolises a happy journey, not death and ruin (Kevin Dutton)

There comes a point in a man’s life when he realises that though he may never have roamed the roads with a chapter of Hell’s Angels, or owned a Triumph or a Harley, he can afford to buy the boutique T-shirt that suggests he did.

The pick of Triumph’s summer clothing range is a GB Rebel T-shirt with a print of a winged skull. A common misconception is that the motif — hijacked by biker gangs in the 1950s and 1960s — was a symbol of death and ruin.

In fact, the winged skull symbolises a happy journey — death being the release from all earthly troubles and the passing on to a better place.

Somehow a Hell’s Angel dressed in a T-shirt with a smiley face on it wouldn’t have looked quite right.