Black and grey tattoo of a raised finger in front of lips beside ornate blackletter lettering with flourishes, on a limb.

Lips and raised finger with blackletter lettering

Lettering · Other · Black and grey · Photo

The design pairs a hand with an index finger raised vertically in front of a pair of lips, drawn with fine engraved-style hatching. Beside it, ornate blackletter lettering with swirling flourishes runs down the left side, shaded with a dark drop shadow. The work is in black ink and grey tones on pale skin against a dark background, with the lettering and hand balanced across the frame.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You keep your hands on the wheel where the officer can see them, the way Marta taught you on the quay at Sarrand. The booth lamp is a yellow smear through the rain on the windscreen. Your passport sits face up on the dashboard, its corner softened by three crossings, and you have practised the face that means you have nothing to declare but tiredness.

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The officer takes the passport, flicks through it without interest, then looks past you at the reefer trailer behind. Inside it, forty crates of tinned apricots are stacked to the ceiling, and beneath the bottom row sits the box that is not apricots, the one wrapped in oilcloth that Marta swore would smell of nothing. Your pulse knocks against your collar. You count the seconds on the clock radio: nineteen, twenty, twenty-one.

He hands the passport back and asks what the cargo is. You open your mouth to recite the manifest, then close it. He is watching your face, not the trailer. Slowly, without a word, he lifts one finger and lays it against his lips, the old gesture of a schoolteacher or a mother with a sleeping child. Then he waves you through.

In the mirror, his lamp stays on your tail lights until the road bends, and you understand that the silence was never his to keep for free. Marta will want to know the price.

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