Colour neo-traditional style tattoo on an upper arm with two ribbon banners bearing a quotation above a geometric emblem in red, blue and cream.

Ribbon banner quote and emblem on upper arm

Traditional · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A tattoo on the upper arm and shoulder shows two curled ribbon banners carrying a line of script, layered over a geometric emblem with a central circle and angular red, blue and cream shapes. The banners and outlines are in black with grey shading, giving the ribbons depth. Colour ink dominates the emblem, and the photo is taken straight on against a plain background with a patterned top in the foreground.

Traditional Lettering Upper arm Quote Script Emblem Geometric shape Circle

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lamp in the box at Corrie Halt had a red glass that cracked every winter, and Mair Pritchard replaced it herself from a spare she kept in a biscuit tin under the lever frame. Nobody had asked her to. The company had sent a fitter once, years before, and he had left a blue lens in by mistake, and on the night the Cwm Hesketh goods came down through the fog with its brakes half gone, it was the blue that nobody could read.

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Her father had told the story so often she could recite the timings: the goods at twenty to twelve, the bell codes tapped out in the dark, the signal held at danger. He had not been the one who stopped it. A lad from the valley, Idris Vaughan, nineteen and new to the line, had ridden the footplate in place of his mate and leaned out with a shovel to jam the wheel. Her father always said Idris came back smelling of hot iron and laughed about it over the Sunday tea urn. He lasted three more years before the pit took him.

Mair kept the tin of spare glass beside a photograph of Idris with his cap pushed back. Each winter, when she changed the red, she said his name aloud, the way some people touch a doorframe on their way out.

Last February a young driver climbed the path with two coffees and asked whether the box was haunted. "Only by the people who got the lights right," Mair said, and handed him the tin.