Black tribal-style scorpion tattoo design on a white background, with a bold printed quote beneath it.

Tribal scorpion design with quote

Blackwork · Black and grey · Flash

A solid black tribal scorpion design with curved claws, segmented legs and a banded tail that curls upward to a pointed stinger. A bold sans-serif quote about overthinking sits in black text beneath the scorpion, which is centred on a plain white background. The image is a clean, high-contrast graphic with no shading, only solid black linework and fills.

Blackwork Scorpion Tribal Quote Text Claw Tail

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Ivo had the 16:40 on the board before the bell finished ringing, and by the time it cleared the junction he had already worked out three ways it could go wrong. The points at Scarrow were sticking again. The goods from Leeds was running early, which meant it would sit on the loop behind the stopper, which meant the stopper would lose its path and the guard would come up the steps asking questions. He wrote all of it in the logbook in pencil, small, the way his father had taught him, and then he wrote a fourth possibility underneath, which was that nothing would happen at all.

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Nothing usually did. That was the trouble with the box. Forty years of trains passing through and the most dramatic thing ever recorded was a ewe on the down line in 1987. Ivo kept a folder of near misses that had never been near at all, scraps where he had stood at the window with his hand on the lever, certain the wheels would slip on the frost, and watched the express slide through with a single hoot that sounded almost like a thank you.

Tonight the goods was early. He pulled the lever for the loop, felt the rod take the weight, and heard the bolt drop home with its satisfying clack. Below him the platform lamps came on one by one, like something long and patient stretching out along the dark. The stopper drew in on time. The guard lifted his flag. Ivo looked at the empty space in the logbook where his fourth worry belonged and, for once, left it blank.

He drank his tea cold and watched the last carriage lights until they were gone. Then he took the folder down from its shelf, slipped the new page inside without reading it, and went down the stairs to see whether the ewe had come back.