Close view of two hands with blackletter lettering spelling RECKLESS across the finger segments in teal ink, with small cross marks above the knuckles.

Reckless lettering across knuckles

Lettering · Hand · Colour · Photo

Two clenched fists are shown from the front, with the word RECKLESS set in blackletter capitals across the finger segments, one letter per finger. Small cross marks sit above the knuckles, and a further tattoo is visible on the back of the right hand. The lines are bold and solid, the ink is a muted teal, and the hands fill the frame against a dark background with a printed shirt behind.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You have worked the crossing at Hollen for eleven winters, long enough to read a man by his papers before you read his face. The lorry that pulls up at half past six has a Polish plate and a driver who keeps both hands on the wheel as if it might leave without him. Across the knuckles of his right hand, black letters in an old gothic hand spell out a word, one letter to each finger, the ink faded to the colour of a pond in February. You know the word before you can read it. You have seen it on a dozen men over the years, and you have never once asked what it cost them.

Keep reading

"Business?" you ask, in the careful English you keep for drivers. He says timber, for a yard outside Leeds. The manifest is in order and the seal on the trailer is intact. But the small crosses above his knuckles are the same marks the old customs men chalked on crates they never opened, a habit from the days when the border was only a river and a rumour. You tell him to pull through to bay four.

Bay four is where the dogs go. The dog finds nothing. The timber is only timber, pale and sweet-smelling, and the driver stands in the drizzle reading the sky as though it were a second manifest. You go back to your booth and sit with the stamp in your hand, the one you use for refusals, and think about how easy it would be to press it down and send him back to wherever he came from.

Instead you pull the page toward you and stamp CLEARED in purple ink, firm and even. When he comes to the window to collect his papers, he looks at the mark and then at you, and for once he does not keep his hands on the wheel. He just nods, and the word goes back into his coat pocket with the rest of him.

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