Traditional colour tattoo of a red and black tugboat with grey smoke clouds and a TUG LIFE banner on the arm.

Tugboat with smoke and TUG LIFE banner

Traditional · Other · Mixed · Photo

A red and black tugboat sits at the centre, with grey smoke clouds behind it and small birds in the sky. A curled banner beneath reads TUG LIFE, with black stars between the words. Bold black outlines, flat colour fills and simple grey shading give it a classic traditional look, with mostly warm reds and oranges against the pale skin.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Gary Pritchard still called me Pilot, the nickname from double maths, and he didn't believe I still worked the river until I showed him the photo on my phone. Eleven hundred horsepower, I told him, stern-first against a box ship coming up past the landing stage on the flood. He squinted at the smoke in the picture and said it looked like a kettle with ambitions.

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"You don't steer the big thing," I said. "You push it where it needs to go, then you keep out of its road when it stops. Skipper Ray Mullins used to say a tug is just a bad-tempered dog with a long lead." Gary laughed too loud, the way he had in assembly when Mr Hale read out the detentions. Behind him the hall had settled into the hum that comes once the buffet has been picked over and the DJ has given up on requests.

Later, in the car park, he bought two pints and pushed one at me. He had been let go from the council depot in March, he said, and his wife thought he was sulking in the shed. I took a beer mat from the bin by the door, found a biro in my coat and wrote the number of the Seacombe office on the back, underlining the bit about deckhands starting Monday.

He turned it over twice before he pocketed it. "Still got the tug horn in your head, then?" he asked. I said I did. Out past the wall a tug was bringing a ship up on the tide, its horn sounding twice, and the gulls lifted off the railings all at once, like someone had shaken out a wet sheet.

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