Small solid black camel silhouette tattoo on the side of a big toe, with the other toes visible beside it.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Camel silhouette tattoo on a toe

Other · Black and grey · Photo

A close-up photograph of a bare foot with a small solid black silhouette of a camel on the big toe. The camel is shown in profile, standing, with a single hump and four legs, and the outline is filled with dense black ink. The background is out of focus and the toes are in soft natural light, with no other colour in the frame.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The camel came up the line from the salt flats on the last Tuesday of the dry season, walking between the rails as though it had been sent for. Oduya Hale, who kept the level crossing at Kettle Siding, saw it first from the signal box and thought it was a trick of the heat. By noon it was lying in the shade of the water tower, chewing slowly, while the stationmaster argued with it in two languages and lost both.

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The old men at the siding said the camel had once carried water to the navvies who laid the track, back when the ground swallowed rain and nobody stayed long. When the line was finished, the carriers were paid off and their animals turned loose. This one had followed the iron from the far end, because iron went somewhere, and nobody had told it that the somewhere had changed.

The station clerk, Miriam Coyle, did the sums. Four hundred litres in the tank, a hundred and ten miles to the next well, and a goods train due on Thursday. She tied a sack of barley to the bench and set a pail beside it, and the camel drank for a long time without looking up. On Wednesday night she heard it stamping on the platform and found it standing at the timetable board, one foot raised, as if it had come to check the departures.

On Thursday the goods train from the coast stopped at Kettle Siding to take on water, and the camel climbed into the empty cattle truck without being asked. Nobody stopped it. Miriam wrote in the day book: one passenger, four legs, no ticket, paid in barley. Then she underlined the entry twice and closed the book, because it was the one the company would never read, and the best she had written all year.