Small black outline tattoo of a cartoon steam train with wheels and a chimney, in fine line style, on the ankle.

Small outline train on an ankle

Fine line · Ankle · Black and grey · Photo

A small tattoo of a simple cartoon steam locomotive with a cab, boiler, chimney and two round wheels is shown on the leg above the foot. The design is drawn in uniform black outline with no shading. It is a black and grey image against a blurred background.

Fine line Ankle Wheel Chimney

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit still now, the kettle's only just stopped singing. You want to hear about Dorrie. She was a tin engine no longer than a man's arm, and she ran the quay tramway at Skerry Hythe, pulling four wagons of herring boxes from the market shed down to the slipway. Her cab had one square window and her chimney was a length of drainpipe. Her two wheels were round, the way wheels ought to be, and she clattered along the rails loud enough to hear from the far end of the harbour wall.

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The November the fleet came home in fog, you couldn't see your own bowsprit. Eleven boats were still out past the Carrick Rocks and the pier lamps were only smudges. Harbourmaster Lowe wanted the tramway shut to save coal, and he said so loud enough for the whole shed to hear. But Dorrie's driver, Ailsa Brand, fourteen and stubborn as a gull, lit the cab lamp and drove up and down that rail all night, whistling like a kettle. Every skipper who heard the clatter steered towards it.

By four in the morning ten boats were tied up at the slip, and the Mary Ann was still out. Ailsa kept going until her whistle was hoarse. Just before dawn a faint horn answered from the murk, then another, and the Mary Ann nosed past the wall with her nets dripping.

The next spring Lowe had a brass chimney cast for Dorrie, and every skipper scratched a fish scale on her boiler with his knife. The paint's long gone now. But when the fog comes in off the water, I still listen for her wheels on the rails and count my way home by them.