Red script lettering over a dark horizontal bar with small star marks, tattooed on the inside of a forearm.

Red script lettering on a forearm

Lettering · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A close photograph of a phrase in red script lettering across the forearm, ending with the word happens. A dark grey or black horizontal bar with a pointed end runs behind the letters, and two small star shapes sit at either end. The red ink is bold and solid with smooth, even edges against the plain skin, and the background is a blue fabric.

Lettering Forearm Script Phrase Bar Star

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lorry from Gdańsk had forty pallets of ceramic hob plates and a driver who kept assuring me the seals were intact, as though I had asked. I turned the manifest over on the bonnet of my car and read it twice while rain came sideways off the river. The seals were fine. The chalk mark on the third pallet was not. Someone had rubbed it out with a thumb and redone it a little higher, which is the sort of tidiness that makes me want to open everything.

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Ilse, who has run this post since before the bridge had lights, says you learn to read a driver's shoulders rather than his paperwork. She taught me that the same week she taught me to make tea properly, and she has never let me forget either lesson. "Stuff happens, Marek," she said when I told her about the chalk, "and then you fill in the form." She tapped the tin plate she keeps nailed beside the kettle, the one with two little painted stars, and went back to her crossword.

I had the pallet pulled into the inspection bay. Under the shrink wrap, behind a sheet of cardboard, sat a wooden crate with air holes drilled in the lid, and inside it a tortoise the size of a dinner plate, looking about as pleased to see me as anyone I have ever arrested. It had a tag wired to its shell with a name written in biro: Gerhard. When I walked back to the cab, the driver said he had no idea what I was talking about, and then asked whether Gerhard was going to be all right.

I told him Gerhard would be fine. He would need a permit, a vet, and a small room with a heat lamp, and I said so in that order. The driver nodded for a long time. Then I went back to the desk, found the box marked Other, and wrote the only word that was true: unexpected.