Small fine line black tattoo of a document icon with an X and the words TATTOO.JPG, placed on the upper arm.

TATTOO.JPG file icon on upper arm

Fine line · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows an outlined document icon with a folded corner and a cross in the centre, with the words TATTOO.JPG written in capital letters beneath it. It is drawn in thin, even black linework with no shading, and the lettering is simple and sans-serif. The small design sits on the outer upper arm against smooth skin, with a plain tiled background and part of a dark top visible at the edge of the frame.

Fine line Upper arm Text Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The rain came sideways off the river on Saturday, and my stall under the blue tarpaulin was the only one still selling dead things. Cracked phones, a Walkman that a man swore still ate tapes, and hard drives in carrier bags, which I charged by the gigabyte and mostly by the sorrow involved.

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The woman who ducked under my awning at half past two had a drive wrapped in a cycling glove. She didn't want her photographs back, she said, only one file. Its name was TATTOO.JPG. When I plugged it in, the folder held nothing but a grey icon of a page with a cross in its middle. Double-click and the screen told me the file could not be opened. The raw data was all zeros, except for one short run of bytes that had been overwritten so many times it looked like someone pressing the same key until the letters wore through.

I spent the rest of the afternoon rebuilding headers while the stallholders packed up around me. The file had been saved on a Tuesday in 2009, the same minute as a deleted folder called Lighthouse. Under the cross, in the slack space, I found a single line of text that was not a file name at all: Still here, don't open.

When I looked up, the woman was watching me from the other side of the tarpaulin, her hand flat over her own sleeve as if to keep something from slipping out. I gave her the drive without a word. She paid in ten pence pieces, counted out slowly, and walked off into the rain. I never did open the file, and I still haven't decided whether that was the right decision.