Barcode tattoos on a finger and wrist

Every soul in Harrowmere had a line of stripes printed on the inside of their wrist back then, with a string of numbers beneath, the way a tin of beans gets labelled. The stripes told the Tollgate what you were worth and where you were allowed to walk. Mabel's ran long and dull, 274870, and she'd had it since she was a girl with no say in the matter.

Then came the spring the hedge-sparrows nested in the gatepost, and a boy from the cider works began leaving her turnips with notes folded inside them. Nothing fancy. Only that the bars on his fingers had been worked by a hot needle, one edge pressed into a little heart, so that when the Tollgate read them the machine sighed, skipped, and could make no sense of it at all.

They tried to log him three times. Each time the beam found a gap shaped like something it had never been taught, and the gate stayed shut on his hand. Officers came with ledgers. The ledgers had no column for a heart.

So the story goes that Mabel walked the Sallow Road with her own wrist bare, the numbers scrubbed to nothing after years at the washtub, and the gate lifted for her because nobody could read her any more. She laughed the whole way to the sea. Some say the sparrows still nest in that gatepost, and that if you hold your palm up to the light the old lines are still there, waiting for someone to break them in the right place.