Traditional style medical alert tattoo on the inner wrist, showing a red cross, blue ring and grey caduceus with the word DIABETIC beneath.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Diabetic medical alert caduceus on a wrist

Traditional · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

The tattoo shows a red cross shape with a blue ring at its centre, enclosing a grey caduceus of a staff with entwined snake and winged top. The word DIABETIC is set in black capitals beneath the emblem. The bold black outlines and flat fills of red, blue and grey are centred on the frame, with the wrist filling most of the photo.

Traditional Forearm Snake Cross Ring

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mrs Okafor came in on a Tuesday with a freezer bag and set it on the counter like evidence. Inside was a brass alert disc on a worn chain, its enamel gone grey at the edges, the little staff and winged top barely showing through. "My son says these are finished," she said. "He says everybody wears the plastic ones now."

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I have run this dispensary on Holloway Road for thirty-one years, and under the till I keep a biscuit tin of discs nobody ever came back for. They go in labelled by year, because I could not bear to bin something that had once told a stranger what they needed to know. I took hers to the back room and rubbed the enamel with a cloth dipped in warm water. Under the grime the red cross came up bright as a struck match, and the blue ring was still blue, a shade the factory stopped making before I was born.

I offered to have it re-enamelled. She laughed and said she had worn it since 1974 and it had never once needed to be read, which was rather the point. Then she asked if she could leave it with me, not for her son, but for the tin. Someone would come in one day with a bad fall or a long shift and a bag of sweets in their pocket, and they would need the disc more than she did.

After she left I opened the tin and laid hers on top of the others, ring facing up. The light from Holloway Road came through the window and sat in the blue for a while before I put the lid back on.