Close photo of the words TAKE CARE in black hand-drawn lettering on a pale arm near the elbow.

Take Care lettering on an arm

Lettering · Other · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo reads TAKE CARE in black uneven capitals, with the letters slightly tilted and spaced irregularly across the skin. It is shown in solid black ink with no shading or colour, on a pale arm that has darker patches of discolouration around the elbow. The background is out of focus in purples, browns and greys, with the lettering placed in the centre of the frame.

Lettering Other Text

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

"Next," I say, the way I have said it for eleven years, and the lorry driver slides his papers under the glass as if they might bite him. The booth smells of burnt coffee and the heater that only works on one setting. Behind me the screens hum through the same list of numbers: passports, plates, seal numbers, nothing that asks anybody how they are.

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Most of them leave without a word. A few, the ones with children asleep in the back or a dog panting in a cage, say thanks in the flat voice of people who have queued too long. Only one ever said the thing I say back to people, and he said it first. He leaned to the gap under the glass, his cap pushed up, and said take care, the way you'd tell a neighbour the bins were out. I had not heard it said to me across a counter before. I stamped his sheet, the ink coming out faint and crooked, and watched his tail lights go red into the rain.

After that I started listening for it. Every shift I waited for someone to say it back, and nobody did, and I began to feel I had been handing things out for years without ever asking for anything in return. I took the stamp home in my coat pocket one night, turned it over under the kitchen light, and found the rubber worn lopsided at the edges.

On my next shift I wrote the words on a yellow sticky note and pressed it to the inside of the glass, facing the queue. Nobody reads it, of course. But the lorry drivers look up at it while they wait, and one morning a woman with a wheezing child tapped the glass and said, take care of yourself, love, and I laughed so loudly the supervisor came over.