Traditional-style tattoo on a forearm of a red star of life with a white snake wrapped around a rod, flanked by grey scrolls reading DIABETIC and TYPE.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Diabetic alert star of life on forearm

Traditional · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A red star of life medical alert symbol with a white snake wrapped around a rod sits at the centre of the design, with a small red drop above its left arm. Grey scroll banners on either side carry the words DIABETIC and TYPE, and the bold black outlines and flat colour fills give it a traditional look. Red dominates the palette, with teal-green shading on the star and skin tones showing through the fills.

Traditional Forearm Snake Scroll Banner Drop

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The radio crackled at first light, and it was Ruth Pell's voice from the Skerry Lass, not the coastguard, asking for Nell Garvey by name. Nell was already pulling her oilskins on over her jumper. Twenty years she had sailed with the fleet as the harbour nurse, and in all that time the boats had only ever called her when someone was going the wrong colour.

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The kit bag lived under the wheelhouse bench of the Mary Ellen, and the star on its strap had faded to pink from years of salt. Old Tam Brannock had insisted on painting a proper star of life on the wheelhouse door when she was first fitted out, red and bold as a lighthouse, and nobody had argued because nobody wanted the sea to forget who to send. Nell clipped the bag to her belt as the swell lifted them over the bar.

Sammy Orr was the youngest deckhand the fleet had seen in a decade, and he was sitting on a coil of rope with his hands shaking in his lap and sweat running into his collar. Nell did not scold him. She asked when he had last eaten, and when he shrugged she watched him dig into his sock and pull out three toffees he had been hoarding for a month, too proud to say he felt off. She tipped sugar onto his tongue herself and kept her hand on his shoulder until the colour came back into his face.

That evening Ruth came up the quay with a tin of red paint and a brush no thicker than a pencil. Nell held the lamp while she touched a single drop beneath the star's left arm, a small bright bead of paint the fleet had agreed meant the nurse had been called out. It caught the last of the light, and the sea kept on being flat and grey behind it.