Black and grey steam locomotive tattoo with a red scalloped background and a windmill on the upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Steam locomotive on upper arm

Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

A large steam locomotive fills the upper arm, with a windmill and smaller buildings rising behind it. The engine is rendered in bold black linework with grey shading and some fine detail on the boiler, wheels and rail. Behind the scene, a red scalloped pattern fills the sky area, adding a strong colour contrast to the greys.

Upper arm Building

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The last train of the Harrow and Gale Travelling Show has stood on the siding at Melton Mowbray since Tuesday, and Mr Harrow has gone to see a man about the bank. That leaves you. Nobody else on the payroll can still raise steam, and the fireman drank the coal money in Leicester. Past the sidings a windmill turns against a sky banded in red scallops, its sails slow as a clock nobody winds any more. You climb into the cab and wipe the frost off the gauge glass with your thumb.

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The fire takes its time. You feed it shovel by shovel, listening to the boiler tick as the iron warms, and you think about the ring that used to fill this field every July. The elephants went to a farm in Wales. The calliope went to a man who plays weddings in Corby. The big top is folded into trunks in the third wagon, smelling of sawdust and wet canvas, and the clowns have all found work in call centres. Nobody has told the engine it is finished.

By four the needle has swung up into the red. Your hands are black to the wrist. You ease the regulator open and the drive wheels shudder, bite the rail, and the whole train groans forward a foot, then another, the wagons behind you rattling like loose teeth. You don't need to go anywhere. You only need to take the old girl the length of the siding once more, past the windmill and the sleeping houses, so that somebody in the village hears her and knows the show is still in town.

At the buffers you bring her to a stop and pull the whistle cord. The note rolls out over the stubble, long and flat. Across the field the windmill's sails catch a breath of wind and begin to turn, slowly, as if they had been waiting for permission. Steam spreads up in a pale fan against the red sky, scallop upon scallop, and for a moment the whole valley looks ready to applaud.