Black and grey lettering tattoo on a person's upper back reading hand wash warm water, mild soap, like dry, do not machine dry and do not iron, with four laundry symbols beneath.

Care label text and laundry symbols on upper back

Lettering · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A black and white photograph of a person's upper back showing four lines of uppercase sans-serif text in black ink, reading hand wash warm water, mild soap, like dry, do not machine dry and do not iron. Four laundry care symbols sit in a row beneath the text, drawn with clean, even outlines. Shading is minimal and the skin is smooth, with a small section of another tattoo visible at the top edge of the right shoulder.

Lettering Back Text

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The guard at Kessel Bridge turned the grey coat inside out, then turned it again, because the label at its collar was printed in a script he could not read. Four lines of capitals and four small pictures. He held it up to the lamp as if the words might rearrange themselves into something a customs man could use.

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The woman who had come over with it was called Marta Halász, and she had sewn that label herself, years before, in the back room of her house in Ober-Lenn where the river ran close enough to hear. She told him plainly what each picture meant. The little basin with a hand in it meant wash by hand, in water no warmer than a child's bath. The square with a dot meant mild soap only. The circle crossed out meant the machine was not to touch it, and the iron crossed out meant that nothing hot was to press the creases from it, because the creases were where the years had gone.

He asked why anyone would make a coat so difficult to keep. She said it was not difficult. It was honest. Anything that could be washed in a river and dried flat on a fence in the wind would outlast anything that had to be pampered, and a coat that had to cross a border twice a year needed to outlast the men who wanted it searched.

The guard looked at the pictures for a long time. Then he noticed the blouse under her shoulder bag, the same small symbols stitched in the same tidy outlines, the same crossed-out iron. He had bought it for his own wife at the market on the other side. He folded the coat over his arm and waved her through, and she walked out onto the far bank, where a line of wet sheets was already snapping in the wind.