Most of us think our bike looks nice. But how does your rig compare to these 12 jaw droppers?

From iconic bikes of yore through to painstakingly executed one-off custom affairs here’s what we reckon are our favourite lookers over the years.

1. Steve Peat’s Lenzerheide bike

Moo! Peaty may well be in his swansong retirement year on the World Cup circuit but that doesn’t mean that he’s going gracefully into the night. He’s clearly raging on with this attention-grabing one-of-a-kind cow themed paintjob courtesy of the amazing guys at Fat Creations…

2. Ken Block’s Specialized Demo 8

#maderadbytony – Intergalactic wonderbike from a collaboration between Specialized, rider Ken Block and graphic genius Tony Baumann…

3. Pop Art Orbea

We stumbled across this on Pinterest. We’re not entirely sure what the bike is – other than a fairly low-end Orbea – but we couldn’t leave it out of this round-up. Wild…

4. Loic Bruni’s World Champs bike

Custom painted World Champs are relatively ten a penny. Most of the time they’re either hideous or just simply a bit meh. This stained glass inspired piece of art for Loic Bruni is clearly the nicest World Champs Special Edition bike ever…

>>> Watch Loic Bruni win the World Championships

5. Intense M9 Formula 1

We don’t know about you but we would rather watch this bike stock still than spend hours yawning through an actual F1 race…

6. Pace RC200

Okay so it’s not paint. It’s anodising. But still, nice. One of the genuine icons of British mountain bikes brought to you by Pace Cycles. More common was the silver RC200 but it was this red one that everyone really wanted…

7. Yeti SB6c Ltd Edition

The best ever incarnation of the classic turquoise and yellow combo. Yeti has a long history in mountain biking, 30 years to be exact, and they celebrated that in style with a mouth-watering, limited edition colour scheme on their flagship SB6c…

8. Muddy Fox Pathfinder

The pic perhaps doesn’t really do this bike justice. Or maybe it’s entirely accurate and it’s our nostalgia-clouded minds that remember this bike being a bit more bling than it actually was. Crackletastic…

9. Diamond Back Ascent

Smokin’ hot. There’s not many things that look cool in ‘primer grey’. Kudos to Diamond Back for coming out with this smoke-themed paintjob on one of their off-the-peg MTBs from the early 90s…

10. Klein Gator Adroit

The nicest looking mountain bike of all time? The Klein Gator Adroit takes the Fat Chance Yo Eddy green-with-blue vibe and just soars with it. Stunning paint…

11 & 12. Dean Tennant’s Transition TR500 paintjobs

SignPad are a Canadian custom wrapping company from Victoria, BC. Dean Tennant is a Transition rider who likes to stand out. They’ve done a couple of fabulous bits of bike art…

Lyle from SignPad: “On that one [pic above] Dean wanted to do something that hadn’t been done in  a bike before. Wrapping a bike is challenging because you must have seams through out as you can’t do it in on a piece.  So the design must be something that’s can hide where you put your seams. So we put together this design pattern as something not yet done on a bike.”

Lyle from SignPad: “No one else had created a bike wrap to match a video edit. So we put together the cedar wrap to match all the cedar planking and wood work in Higher Calling 2″

>>> Transition Scout X01(2015) review

Have we missed your favourite?

Let us know if the comments below. We’ll consider all suggestions and may update this page with the best ones.