Small fine line black tattoo of a DNA double helix on the inner wrist, shown as a hand gives a thumbs up.

DNA helix on the inner wrist

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A small double helix, drawn as two intertwined strands with horizontal rungs, sits on the inner wrist. The linework is thin and dark grey, with no shading. The hand is raised in a thumbs up against a car dashboard, and the tattoo is shown in the lower centre of the frame.

Fine line Forearm

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The last train through Coldharbour Junction was always the 23:14 to Leeds, and my father would stand on the down platform with a torch, counting the sleepers under his breath as if the line might have slipped a few in the dark. He spent thirty-one years on the permanent way for British Rail and never once let me forget that a railway is only two steel rails with a row of rungs holding them apart. Take the rungs away, he said, and the rails drift, the gauge goes, and the whole thing wanders off towards the fields like a sheep that's lost its dog.

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The night the fog came down thick enough to swallow the signal post, the box telephone rang twice and then went dead. I took the lamp and walked the up line with Dad's old notebook in my coat pocket, though I already knew every bolt on that stretch. The rails ran ahead of me, shining wet, and every few yards a tie lay across them like a stitch pulling two edges together. Somewhere past the sidings I realised I had been counting them too, the way he had, and that the count steadied me more than the lamp did.

I reached the fault at twenty to midnight, found a cracked insulator, and had the signal back before the 23:14 was due to clear the junction. From the bank I watched it come through the murk, lit up like a sweet wrapper, its wheels hissing over the joints. The rails never once touched each other, and the ties never once let them go. I stood there a while after the tail lamp had gone, with the notebook still dry in my pocket.