Black and grey barcode tattoo with the word HUMAN beneath it, placed on a woman's upper chest near the shoulder, in a sepia photograph.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Barcode with HUMAN on upper chest

Chest · Black and grey · Photo

A woman's shoulder and upper chest are shown in a sepia-toned photograph, with her lips visible at the top of the frame and her hair falling behind her shoulder. A small black barcode tattoo with the word HUMAN printed beneath it sits just below the collarbone, rendered in solid black ink with crisp edges. The composition is close and soft, with a white knitted jumper slipping off the shoulder and a vintage border and light scratches across the image.

Chest

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Old Dunmore kept the galley of the Harrow Bay the way his mother kept a chapel, with everything in its place and nothing spoken above a murmur. The tins were stacked by weight, the flour by date, and when the owners sent a new scanner down the gangway at Rotterdam, he was the only one who would let it near his shelves.

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The trouble began with the tinned peaches. Every tin had its stripes, black bars the width of a thumbnail, and the little reader beeped its approval at each one. But one morning it beeped twice and printed a word across the screen where the price should have been. HUMAN. Dunmore held the tin up to the porthole light and frowned. The bars were honest enough. The word sat beneath them like a name cut into a headstone.

He did not tell the mate. He sat on an upturned crate, peeled the label away, and found the same bars printed on the underside of the tin, very small and very neat. Somebody in that factory had been counting something, he thought, and had never been able to stop.

For three nights he ate nothing from the stores and listened to the hull ticking as it cooled. On the fourth morning the scanner had gone from its hook, and in its place lay a brass ladle with a stripe stamped into the handle. Dunmore weighed it in his palm and found it exactly as heavy as a man should expect to carry. He stirred the porridge with it and said nothing, which was the way of his people, and the porridge came out sweet.