This tattoo of the Orange Line train fire last month has to be seen to be believed.
An MBTA train car, complete with horns, bursts from red flames. It's a tribute to the infamous incident from last month in which about 200 people evacuated from an flaming Orange Line train over the Mystic River, and it's on the leg of drag king Slim Jym Shorts.
They take the Orange Line every day, and when they saw a friend, a tattoo artist, post the doodled sketch on social media, they had to have it.
"I saw and was like, that's sick. I love that. That's iconic. I'm going to get it," said Shorts, who asked to be identified with their drag name and uses they/them pronouns.
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An image of the tattoo, posted to the website Universal Hub as "today's hottest," went viral online, while the Orange Line is shut down for 30 days for major and badly needed repairs. On Wednesday, federal transit officials announced a litany of changes the MBTA must make to become safer.
Shorts called it "surreal" to watch what they called the decline of the MBTA in the two years since they moved to Boston, and said the Orange Line shutdown has been "infuriating." The tattoo is a bit of art that's both beautiful and which helps them process what's happened, they said.
"It’s just unfortunate how dangerous and unreliable the MBTA has gotten because that decreases ridership and that decreases funds. It decreases our ability to invest in the infrastructure," Shorts said. "But whenever I have people who don’t take the T or drive and they joke about how bad it is I’m always, like, very defensive of– public transit is critical. So many of us rely on it. "It’s beautiful, it’s what makes cities good."
The tattoo artist did not want to be identified but shared this comment on their design:
My goal is to showcase that the US as a whole and even in wealthy cities have so many issues. This orange line shutdown impacts so many people, while wealth is hoarded to new condos and landlords and billionaires, trains and buses are catching on fire and the forests are burning in the worst drought since the 1800s. If we don’t act drastically, like getting a burning train tattoo, advocating for sustainable energy and transit and shared resources, the problems will amplify.
Shorts noted that the designer also did a version of the doodle with a halo over the train, and they together represent "kind of the good and bad."
