Black and white line drawing of a boxy vintage car with an open door and Russian lettering reading не уверен and не обгоняй, shown as a tattoo design without a body placement.

Car with Russian lettering flash

Black and grey · Flash

A black line drawing of a boxy vintage car with an open driver's door, drawn with even outlines and hatched windows. Two lines of Russian lettering sit above and to the right of the car, reading 'не уверен' and 'не обгоняй', and a solid black ink shape spreads beneath the car. The image is black and grey on a plain white background with no shading beyond the solid black areas.

Car Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The tractor ahead has been crawling since the Stennis turn, and you have spent eleven miles learning its driver: the lazy two-finger wave, the pause at every gate, the way he drifts left to let the sheep spill across the road. You want to pass him. Your hands want it. Beside you, Ruth taps the dashboard where a card is wedged under the wiper stalk, the one her father lettered in careful Cyrillic before he died: не уверен, не обгоняй. Not sure. Don't overtake. He kept it on every car he owned, and when people laughed he told them it was the only rule of the road that never let him down.

Keep reading

You don't overtake on Hallin. The road is single track, with passing places cut into the heather every quarter mile, and the sea is always one bad bend away. At the bend above Skerry Bay a van comes round on your side of the road, horn blaring, and you are glad, later, that you stayed back and let the tractor's bulk be the only thing between you and its grille. The van clips the verge, shudders, and is gone, with a hand out of the window that might have been an apology.

Ruth doesn't say anything. She pulls the card free and tucks it in the glovebox. At the causeway the tide has come up and left a black tongue of weed across the tarmac, glossy as spilled ink. You drive over it slowly, behind the tractor, in no hurry at all.