Fine line black barcode tattoo with the word HUMAN beneath it, placed on the inside of a wrist.

Barcode with HUMAN on a wrist

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A black barcode sits across the inner wrist, with the capital letters HUMAN printed in a clean sans serif beneath the bars. The linework is crisp and even, with solid black bars and no shading. The background shows an office with filing trays and paper notes, and the tattoo is the sharp focal point.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You are sorting returns in the depot at Slough when the scanner stalls on a carton that has no business being there. The label is printed cleanly, the bars black and even, and beneath them sits the word HUMAN, as if someone at the factory had run out of ideas and reached for the nearest catalogue heading. Supervisor Okafor leans over your shoulder with his tea and says the lot is probably a mislabel from the Leeds hub, the kind of thing that happens when the printers are older than the people feeding them.

Keep reading

You know better than to argue with the scanner, so you do the sensible thing and open the carton. Inside are forty rolls of unbleached paper, a box of pencils worn down to stubs, and a handwritten card that reads, in a loopy hand, Keep these for whoever comes after. Nobody in the depot has written in pencil since the Ledger went live. You turn the card over. On the back someone has drawn a small door with a key beside it, and the key is shaped like the bars on the carton.

Okafor's tea goes cold on the shelf. When you pass the card over the scanner, it returns a single line of amber text: CATEGORY NOT RECOGNISED. For the first time in eleven years the machine does not know what to call the thing in your hand, and you find you do not mind. You take a pencil, tuck the card into your sleeve, and write UNREGISTERED under the bars, pressing so hard the lead snaps.

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