Pencil drawing of a tribal-style design with a blank central circle, flanked by swirling bands filled with hatched and chevron patterns, shown on a plain background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Tribal-style circle design in pencil

Black and grey · Flash

A pencil drawing of a symmetrical tribal-style design built around a large empty circle. Curved, wave-like bands sweep around the circle and are filled with fine hatching, chevrons and dotted detail. The drawing is shaded in black and grey on a plain off-white background.

Circle Swirl Wave Tribal pattern Hatching Chevron

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The last train to Penhallow left at twenty to eleven, and by then the sea had usually come over the wall. My father kept a ledger of the nights the spray reached the platform, columns ruled in red ink in the signal box, and when he retired he left it to me with the lamp oil and a brass key that opened nothing I could find.

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That October a man stepped off the Plymouth connection carrying a station clock with no hands. He wanted the stationmaster, who had died in the spring, so he asked me instead. The face was a clean white disc, the black case furred with salt, and he said it had stopped the night the big swell took the sea-wall and the rails ran with water like wet slate. "It only needs its hands back," he said. "The rest still turns."

I had the spare pair in the waiting room drawer, the thin black ones my father fitted in 1979 and never got round to replacing. The man worked them onto the spindle with a penknife while the tide crept up the timber edge of the platform, the wave-shaped ripples of foam catching the lamplight. When he stood back, the clock read ten past eleven, which was exactly when the sea first showed at the wall.

He thanked me and walked off toward the road. I stood a while watching the water draw back off the sleepers, leaving each one striped with wet, the way the sea marks its own lines on sand. Then I opened the ledger, wrote the date, the word tide, and nothing else, and left the rest of the page blank for whoever came after me.