Colour tattoo on a forearm reading Diabetes Type 1 in typewriter-style lettering, set over a blue ring with blue, purple and pink watercolour splashes and drips.

Diabetes Type 1 watercolour tattoo on forearm

Lettering · Forearm · Colour · Photo

The tattoo shows the words Diabetes Type 1 in a typewriter-style font, set in black across a blue circular ring. The ring and its surrounding splashes are shaded in soft blue, purple and pink, with thin drips running down from the base. The photograph is taken close up and straight on, with the ink sharp against the skin and a blurred green background.

Lettering Forearm Circle Watercolour splash Drip

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

At Saltergate market the rain came sideways off the river, and Mabel Quint kept her typewriter under a tarpaulin with only its keys showing. People paid a penny to have a sentence typed for them, something to carry home in a pocket. Most asked for names. A carter asked for his mother's address in Hull. A girl once sat on the upturned crate for an hour and asked for nothing at all, only watched the letters come up black and square on the card.

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One Thursday a man came with a tin of watercolour and a brush wrapped in wool. He said the rain was the only honest paint in Saltergate, and he dipped the brush in the puddle by her stall and laid a blue ring across a card in one wet stroke. Mabel typed the words he gave her across the middle of it, one word at a time, the bell ringing at each line's end. Where the wet blue ran over the edges of the letters, it bled into purple and pink and dripped in thin threads toward the bottom of the card, and the paper curled like a sleeve.

The old saying at the market was that anything typed in the rain would stay wet until the one it was for came back to fetch it. Mabel laughed at that for thirty years. Then the man did come back, grey at the temples, holding the card flat against his chest so the drips would not smear, and asked her to type one line more beneath the ring.

She rolled a fresh sheet in, struck the keys, and the bell rang. He read the line, folded the card into his coat, and walked off into the rain, which had finally stopped falling inside the blue circle.