Pencil drawing of a tattoo design showing a hand holding a mushroom, with a skull, snake, lotus, cannabis leaves and crescent moon, shown without a body placement.

Hand holding mushroom with skull and snake

Black and grey · Flash

A shaded pencil drawing of a tattoo design in which a hand raises a mushroom cap, with a skull on the left and a snake coiling down the left and right sides. A lotus, a cluster of cannabis leaves, a crescent moon and a small spiral symbol sit around the hand. The work uses soft grey graphite shading with fine outlines on a white background.

Hand Mushroom Skull Snake Lotus Crescent moon

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The mushroom came up between the rails at Hollin Cross every October, the week the last excursion train ran through without stopping. Stationmaster Tobias Quayle watched it from his window with a mug going cold in his hand. It was pale as skimmed milk and freckled all over its cap, and it stood on a stalk as thick as a fence post, lifted clear of the ballast as if somebody below had hold of it by the wrist.

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Agnes Pell, who kept the signal box and had kept it since the war, said the ground was only raising its hand to be counted. The porters laughed, but they walked the long way round it. By November a snake had wound itself up the signal post, grey and patient, and it turned its head to watch each train come in. The lost property box held a skull nobody would claim, and a crescent of horn no bigger than a fingernail that Tobias kept in his waistcoat pocket.

The Thursday the 4.10 was late, a boy called Danny Fairley came down the platform with a penknife and a paper bag. He said his nan would pay good money for a mushroom like that. Tobias said nothing. He only watched the moon come up over the cutting, a thin white curve, and saw the snake lift its head toward the boy the way a dog lifts its head at a whistle. Danny stopped a yard short of the stalk. His hand would not close. He stood there until the 4.10 came round the bend with its lamps lit, and the driver, who had never once in thirty years braked for Hollin Cross, sounded his horn twice.

Danny walked home without his bag. Tobias went out at dawn and stood beside the cap, which had not moved, and he put his own hand under it as if to hold it up. The rails were wet. Somewhere down the line a bell rang for the first train, and the mushroom's shadow lay across the sleepers, long and open, like a palm held out for the fare.