Eiffel Tower on an inner forearm

The man beside you has a flask of tea and a fitter's hands, grey at the knuckles. He notices you reading the ticket for the third time and tells you the tower was only ever meant to stand twenty years, a temporary thing put up for a fair, and that the men who riveted it ate their lunch on the girders because nobody thought it would outlast the crowds. He unclips a biro from his shirt pocket and sketches on the back of a timetable leaflet, the lattice going up in quick, sure strokes, the legs splaying to the ground, the narrow waist, the little spike at the top.

He is not an artist, he says, only a man who spent thirty-one years looking at things other people built and wondering how they held. The tannoy calls your train. You stand, and he tears the leaflet along the margin, folds it into a neat square and presses it into your hand without ceremony. You never learn his name, and you will never see him again, yet once you are aboard, the first thing you do is open the paper against the window and trace those open lines with your thumb while the flat fields give way to grey water.

Somewhere after the tunnel you realise you have stopped checking the ticket. You are holding the tower instead, its ironwork open to the light, and the train keeps carrying you towards the city that was never supposed to keep it.