Pen and wash drawing of a semi truck speeding down a highway, with the words "For the love of the open road..." beneath it, shown as a tattoo design sketch.

Semi truck on the open road design

Mixed · Flash

A pen and wash sketch of a large semi truck with a chrome grille and tall exhaust stack, driving towards the viewer on a motorway with blurred motion lines and a warm sunlit glow. The words "For the love of the open road..." sit beside the truck in cursive lettering, with a second copy of the phrase and the date 5-19-2012 shown below on the same sheet. The linework is loose and sketched, with soft blue, grey and orange washes.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nobody at the Hollins Park reunion expected Dougie Pask to turn up in a pressed shirt, but there he was by the trestle table, holding a plastic cup of orange squash as if it might go off. I hadn't seen him since the summer we left Year Eleven, when he borrowed his uncle's Bedford van and we all swore blind we'd never been in it.

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He'd spent twenty-odd years driving lorries across Europe, he said, Calais to Bari and back again, mostly at night. He talked about the motorways that run flat for hours, and the way the sun comes up behind you in the mirror so the whole cab fills with gold before you've had your first proper cup of tea. He'd kept a sketchbook on the passenger seat for most of that time, drawing whatever stopped him: services at dawn, a jackknifed trailer in Lyon, the chrome grille of his own rig catching the light.

He was packing it in, he told me, because his knees had given up on the steps and his daughter had found a flat near hers in Doncaster. He didn't sound sorry. He sounded like a man who'd been given back his evenings and didn't yet know what to do with them.

When the caretaker started stacking chairs, Dougie walked me out to the car park. He pulled a folded page from his jacket, a pen-and-wash drawing of a truck bearing down on the viewer with the road streaming behind it, and tucked it into my hand without a word. Then he got into a silver hatchback that was nothing like a lorry and eased out past the bins, slow, the way a man takes a bend he has taken ten thousand times.