Black and grey realism tattoo of a semi truck with smoke, a moon and the script The Ride Home, on the calf.

Semi truck with The Ride Home script

Realism · Calf · Black and grey · Photo

A large semi truck with a long trailer is shown front on in shaded greys, with billowing smoke and a pale moon behind it. The script lettering The Ride Home arches across the top, and a small figure stands at the right edge beside the trailer. Fine shading and highlights give the metal and smoke volume against a plain background of skin.

Realism Lettering Calf Smoke Moon Script Lettering Figure Road

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Walt Dorsey had been counting mile markers since the diner at Harrow Flats, and by the third hour of dark he had stopped trusting the numbers on them. The moon hung low over the rim like a coin someone had forgotten to pick up, and the exhaust from the stacks rolled back over the cab in long grey ropes. At the lay-by past the cattle grid, a woman in a long coat stood beside the trailer with a lantern held down by her knee. She didn't wave. She just said, "You're carrying one more than you signed for."

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Walt told her the manifest said forty crates of seed grain, and he had counted forty on the yard. She tilted the lantern towards the back doors and said he could check if he liked. He didn't like. He pulled the air brake and kept the engine running, and when he looked in the mirror again the lay-by was empty and the trailer's rear seal was hanging open with a little bit of dust settling on the road beneath it.

He drove on to the depot at Coldwater with his hands sore from the wheel. The yard man, Ossie, ran his torch along the seals and counted the crates twice, then a third time with his lips moving. Forty. Walt was about to sign when Ossie frowned at the last pallet and pulled back a tarp. Behind the grain sat a small wooden box with a brass tag. The tag read Delivered, and under it a date from nineteen years back, and a mileage his father had never got to log.

Walt signed the book without reading the rest. Outside, the moon had climbed clear of the rim and the smoke had thinned to nothing, so he sat on the step of the cab for a while with the box on his knees, and for the first time in twenty years he did not check the mirror on the way home.