Black silhouette design of birds in flight forming an infinity symbol, with the words hakuna matata in cursive script across the centre.

Birds forming an infinity loop with script

Lettering · Black and grey · Flash

A black silhouette drawing on a plain white background shows small birds in flight arranged in the shape of an infinity symbol. The words hakuna matata run diagonally through the centre in a flowing cursive script. The image is made of solid black shapes and text with no shading, and the composition is centred and evenly spaced.

Lettering Bird Infinity symbol Script

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The guard at Lwala Bridge turns your passport over twice before he finds the page he wants, and asks you, in careful English, what the words mean. You tell him they are Swahili and mean no worries. He doesn't smile. He has been on the bridge since six, and the lorries behind you have been idling since before the sun cleared the ridge.

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You drew the design yourself on the back of a delivery receipt the winter your mother's shop closed. Birds going round and round a figure eight, never landing, never getting anywhere they hadn't already been. Your cousin Anyango said it looked like a bad omen. Your mother said it looked like a joke that had taken a long time to tell.

The guard stamps the page. Then he slides the passport back under the glass and, without looking up, says the phrase again, slower, the way you might repeat a password to someone who has forgotten it. Hakuna matata. He pronounces it perfectly. You wonder who taught him, and whether he learned it from a cartoon or from an old man who sold road maps from a folding table outside the market for thirty years.

You walk the last hundred metres with the pass in your breast pocket. Behind you the barrier lifts with a clank, and the birds in your head keep turning around the loop, and for once you do not count the ways it could go wrong. You count the stamps instead. Two. Enough to get you through.