Realistic steam locomotive with a skull front and red eyes, shaded in black and grey against orange and red sunset tones, on a forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Skull-faced steam train on a forearm

Realism · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A steam locomotive with a skull for its front end is shown in side view, with its boiler, chimney, wheels and track rendered in heavy black and grey shading with metallic highlights. The skull's red eyes stand out against a background of orange and red that fades into a smoky wash. The design wraps along the forearm, with the track running across the lower edge of the piece.

Realism Forearm Skull Smoke Sunset

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The engine came up out of the heat on the Tolliver cut the week the river dried, and nobody on the section gang would say who had ordered her. Old Pruett swore she had a skull for a front end, and when we walked down to look, he was right: bone-white under the soot, two red lamps burning where the eyes ought to be, and a grin of iron rivets that caught the sun like teeth. The track she rode was bent the wrong way, as if it had been laid by someone who meant to go somewhere else.

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I took the fireman's job because the company paid in silver and my boots had holes. We ran west with the sky turning orange behind us and the smoke from her stack lying flat across the desert like a grey road of its own. She never needed coal. She burned whatever you fed her, a broken hoe, a dead man's hat, once a bottle of Pruett's whisky, and every time she took it she grinned a little wider.

At the water tank in Sable Wells we found the station empty, the telegraph wire humming with nobody on the key. Pruett climbed up to the cab and came down white as the bone on her face. He said the engineer's seat was empty, the throttle was already open, and the brass plate read the name of my own father. I didn't believe him until I went up myself and saw my own hand on the regulator, though I had not touched it.

We are still running. The red lamps shine on the rails ahead of us, and I keep shovelling, because the one who stops shovelling is the one she takes for fuel.