Black and grey barcode tattoo with printed digits on the inner wrist of a person's arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Barcode tattoo on the wrist

Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A photograph of a black and grey barcode tattoo on the inner wrist, with a few vertical bars and printed digits beneath them. The lines are crisp and evenly spaced, with slightly softened grey shading in places. The ink sits centrally on the wrist against plain, dim surroundings, with the hand visible at the bottom of the frame.

Forearm Number Wrist

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Snow had shut the Crowfoot Inn's car park by four, and by six Ruth Penhallow had counted the tins twice and come up one short of everything except the custard. Stocktaking was her excuse for hiding in the back room, away from the fire where the walkers argued about the weather. The scanner on its cracked lead blinked at her each time she dragged a crate across the flags, a red eye that refused to read anything without the printed digits beneath.

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Half the stock had its bars rubbed off by damp, so she typed the figures in by hand, reading each one aloud the way her late husband used to over the telephone. Peas, 5010. Beans, 2201. Around the third crate she found a wholesaler's docket from Hexham with a line scrawled across the bottom: Do not sell the blue tins. No reason given, and no signature.

The blue tins sat behind the paraffin, forty of them, their labels faded to the colour of weak tea. Each one carried a barcode with evenly spaced grey stripes and the same stub of numbers, 0742 and then a run she could not make out. The scanner took them without complaint. Only the price gun failed, flashing its error each time she aimed it, as though the tins had never been priced at all.

At closing she sat with the docket and a cup of tea gone cold. Her husband had kept these shelves for thirty years and never once written a note. She tore the docket in half, put the blue tins back where they belonged, and wrote on the inventory sheet in her neat capitals: NOT FOR SALE. Outside the snow kept falling on the car park, and nobody in the inn asked what it meant.