Black script lettering reading Diabetes 1 inside an infinity-style loop on the inside of a forearm near the wrist.

Diabetes 1 script on a wrist

Lettering · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of black script lettering on the inner wrist, reading Diabetes with a 1 beneath a stroke, all enclosed in an infinity-style loop. The linework is clean and of even weight, with simple black ink and no shading. The skin tone is light and the background is a plain dark red, with the tattoo centred in the frame.

Lettering Fine line Forearm Script Infinity symbol

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Tomas Okonedo had catalogued the Harrow Vault for eleven years when the drone brought up the tile, and he still could not decide whether the looped word on it was a name or an instruction. The letters ran in a rounded hand across the glaze: a long word spelled D, I, A, B, E, T, E, S, then a stroke, then a single numeral, all held inside a figure of eight laid on its side. Nobody in the Vault had seen that frame before.

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Ada, the junior, wanted to feed it to the reader. "It's a sum," she said, tapping the numeral. "One, and whatever it counts goes round forever." Tomas had grown up on the coast, where lighthouse keepers slipped notes into biscuit tins, and he had learned that people only wrote down the words they could not easily say aloud. The stroke under the one seemed to him to say that the count was not the whole of it.

They spent a week on it. The reader offered a dozen dead words that fit the first letters, and none of them fitted the shape of the hand. Then Ada found a ledger of flagged terms in a water-stained cabinet, and turned the pages to show him a column of entries, each one marked with a small cross and the same looping frame drawn around it like a fence put up to keep something in or out.

Tomas chalked the word on the wall of the reading room and drew the loop around it, then underlined the one. "So it's a warning," Ada said. "Or a promise to keep counting." He wiped the chalk from his palm, left the loop standing in the dust, and went to fetch the kettle.