Colour drawing of a cracked red, white and blue round shield with a white star, green leaves and two grey banners reading OUTLIVE THE TEST OF TIME, designed as a traditional style tattoo.

Cracked shield with leaves and banners

Traditional · Colour · Flash

A coloured pencil drawing on a sketchbook page shows a round shield with red and white rings, a blue field and a white five-pointed star at the centre, with several visible cracks across its surface. Green leaves frame the shield on the top and sides, and two grey ribbon banners cross the upper and lower parts of the design, carrying the lettering OUTLIVE THE TEST OF TIME. Bold black outlines and grey shading on the banners give it a classic flash sheet look, with colour applied in red, blue, green and yellow.

Traditional Shield Star Leaves Banner Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The porter at Hollin Cross kept a round shield nailed above the ticket hatch. It was beaten tin, painted red and white in rings, with a blue middle and a white star at the centre. Nobody at the station could say who had made it, only that it had hung there before the line was doubled, and that the first porter had told the signalmen to read its face before any night run.

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Each winter the frost found a new crack in it. Each spring Ada Penrose, who had the hatch after her husband, took it down, soldered the split, and hung it back on its nail. The station master called it a foolish thing. He said so every October when the timetables changed, and every October he let it stay.

The winter the snow filled the cutting, a goods train was stuck below the bridge with its lamps guttering. The signal would not clear and the driver could not see the line ahead. Ada climbed the embankment with a lantern and held the shield up against the glass, so the red and white caught the light and threw it back down the track. The driver saw it, braked, and came in slow. Nobody was hurt.

When the line was closed in a later decade, the shield went to a depot in the next county on the back of a lorry. The new porter hung it on a nail and found the cracks had run together into a web. He left them alone. The solder still shows along the rings, bright as a seam of new metal, and the men who pass it say the cracks are the only part of the railway they trust.