Black and grey photo of a palm with a small barcode tattoo and the word SLAVE in spaced capitals beneath it.

Barcode and SLAVE tattoo on a palm

Lettering · Hand · Black and grey · Photo

A black and grey photograph of an open palm, shown against a plain light background. A black barcode sits across the centre of the palm, with the word SLAVE in spaced capital letters printed directly beneath it. The fine black linework is crisp and the monochrome lighting keeps the focus on the tattoo.

Lettering Hand Word Palm

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Ruth Abernethy had checked pallets on the night shift at Harrow Quay for eleven years, and in all that time the scanner had never once argued with her. Then a crate of tinned mackerel came up the belt and gave two long beeps, and the screen showed a name where the product description should have been.

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She pulled the manifest. The consignment was logged as sundry stock, weight nil, and under the code someone had typed a surname, then deleted it, leaving the faint ghost of the letters in the field. She remembered that surname from the local paper the spring before, a young man found in the hold of a fishing boat that had come in from the North Sea with its nets half full and its crew half gone. The paper had printed a photograph of the quay. Ruth had recognised the lamp outside the gate.

She did not log the crate. She took the biro from behind her ear and copied the code onto the back of her hand, then the name beneath it, pressing hard, the way you write a phone number you are afraid of losing. Then she unplugged the scanner, walked the crate to the office, and typed the name into the owner field herself, letter by letter, until the system had to accept it.

By six the depot manager was shouting about a fault in the software. Ruth signed off her shift with the mark still on her hand, and it was still there on the bus home, a line of numbers and one stubborn word that no reader on the belt could make into stock again.