Black and grey photograph of a barcode tattoo with the word SLAVE beneath it, placed in the centre of an open palm.

Barcode and SLAVE on a palm

Lettering · Hand · Black and grey · Photo

A black and grey photograph of an open palm showing a barcode tattoo with the word SLAVE in spaced capital letters beneath it. The barcode uses solid black vertical bars of varying widths, with crisp, clean linework and no visible shading. The hand fills the frame against a plain grey background, with the tattoo sitting near the centre of the palm.

Lettering Hand Palm Word Hand

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Tuesday, 14th March. The new scale at Pell's Quay weighs everything now, even the lamp oil, and Mr Harrow wants every crate given a number in ink before it is allowed off the lighter. I have written four hundred and six numbers this week. My hand aches from it, and I have started to think of the numbers as names, which is foolish, because they are only tallies.

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Yesterday a man came up from the holds with a bandage round one hand, and when he flattened his palm on the counter to sign for his wages I saw the mark beneath the linen: a row of thick and thin black bars, and under them a word spelled out letter by letter. He saw me looking. He did not hide it. He only said, 'Written on, so nobody can say later I was never in the book.' I have thought about that all night.

The ledger in the back room lists the cargoes of forty years. Beside each entry, in my predecessor's neat copperplate, there is a column headed Disposal, and against many of them he has written sold. I have never once asked what was sold. Tonight I took the old book down, dipped my pen, and in the margin beside the Marigold's cargo of 1831 I wrote the names the manifest left out, one by one, until the page would hold no more.

Tomorrow Harrow will check my figures and find them wrong, and I will tell him they are right in the way that counts. Then I will walk down to the harbour and find that sailor, and ask him to spell the word again, slowly, so that I can copy it into the book in my own hand.