Black and grey realistic tattoo of a steam locomotive on a rib cage, with a track beneath it.

Steam locomotive on the ribs

Realism · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A detailed steam locomotive sits on a length of railway track, shown front three-quarter view with its boiler, smokestack, dome, and spoked driving wheels. The rendering uses fine hatching and smooth grey shading to give the metal a three-dimensional, weathered look. The tattoo is framed against plain skin, with a hand and a wrist watch visible at the top right.

Realism Ribs Wheel

Find an artist for this

Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The engine would not cross the Kelp Bridge after dark, and everyone on Inish Varra knew why. Her name was painted on her side in faded red, and the men who hauled slate down the line from the north quarry said she had a mind of her own. Old Donal Meehan drove her for thirty winters. He never once swore at her, and she never once stalled on the grade.

Keep reading

When the quarry closed, the company sent her to a scrapyard on the mainland, and the boat came back with her chained to the deck. Donal walked down to the harbour every evening with his lamp and a tin of oil, though there was nothing left to oil. His daughter Nessa, who had grown up with coal dust in her hair, asked him what he was waiting for. He said he was waiting for the whistle.

In November a gale tore open the sea wall. The night the water came over the harbour road, the children in the high cottages heard a long whistle come down off the hill, then the clank and hiss of a boiler being fired. Donal went out along the rails with his lamp and found the track running clean into the sea, and on it, shining like a coin, a small brass light that was not his.

The next morning every child on the island had a smudge of coal on their collar, and the sea wall was standing. Nessa still keeps a lamp on the windowsill, and when the wind comes from the north she says the engine is only taking the long way round.