Pencil and ink flash sheet showing rat silhouettes with ornate key tails and Mind the Gap lettering, drawn without any body placement shown.

Rat and key designs with Mind the Gap script

Dotwork · Black and grey · Flash

The sheet shows three drawings of a rat paired with an ornate key, with the words Mind the Gap in hand-lettered script above or below. Two of the rats are solid black silhouettes with stippled dotwork shading beneath them, while the third is an ink and pencil sketch with construction lines. The designs are in black ink on cream paper with no colour.

Dotwork Lettering Key Script Lettering Sketch

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Forty years I kept the lamps on the Ashgrove line, and the one thing they never warned us about in training was the rats. Not the ordinary sort that come up for the crusts. These were the long-tailed, sleek sort that walk the platform edge like they've paid for the ticket. Old Mr Pardoe, who had the box before me, swore they carried keys in their tails. I laughed at him, right up until the night the Tuesday last train came in forty minutes early and a rat sat on the gap between carriage and platform, staring at me as if I owed it money.

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It had a key looped through the curl of its tail, brass gone green at the bow, the wards cut like little castle teeth. I'd seen that key before, on a hook in the lost property cupboard, labelled in Pardoe's cramped hand: Gap, do not use. The rat dropped it at my boots and went under the lip of the platform, and I heard it scrabbling down the old drainage shaft that the council swore had been bricked up in 1931.

I should have left it. Instead I lifted the lamp, got down on my knees on the wet tiles, and read the words Pardoe had painted under the shelf in the lamp room, the ones I'd always taken for a joke: mind the gap, and mind what's on the other side of it. The shaft breathed warm air up at me, smelling of oil and summer. I fitted the key. It turned like it had been waiting a century for someone to be curious enough.