Black cursive lettering reading Diabetic with a blue ring outline beneath it, tattooed on skin in a close-up photo.

Diabetic script with blue circle

Lettering · Other · Mixed · Photo

The tattoo shows the word Diabetic in black cursive script with smooth, even linework and slight shading. Below the lettering sits a solid blue ring outline, which is the only colour in the image. The photo is a close, tightly framed view of the skin, with the text filling the upper area and the ring centred beneath it.

Lettering Other Script Circle

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, you lot, and mind the fire, because this one is about the Word-Keepers of Tallow Hill and the blue ring they hung above their door. Four hundred winters after the Quiet, when the old towns had gone to reed and rust, the Keepers still read the letters carved on their lintel every morning, though nobody living could say what most of them meant. The longest word was Diabetic. It curled across the stone like a river that had forgotten where it was going, and beneath it sat a ring of blue glass, set so true it caught the sun before anything else on the hill did.

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Young Orla Penhallow asked about it the summer she turned twelve. She had come up with a basket of eggs and a grudge against her uncle, and she found old Marrin sitting on the step with his knees cracked like kindling. He took the eggs and said nothing for a long while. Then he tapped the glass with one knuckle. "That ring tells the travellers that someone in this house keeps a close eye on a small thing that could go wrong quickly. Bring the sweet water, bring the patience, and don't argue." Orla frowned at the curling word. "Why such a fancy hand for a warning?" "The old makers wanted it to look like a promise," said Marrin, "not a sentence."

That autumn a boy from the lower valley came up the track, lost and dizzy in the heat, and Orla was the one who ran for water. Afterwards she climbed onto the step with a chisel, her uncle's temper still in her shoulders, and carved a second ring beneath the first. It came out wobbly and too wide.

Marrin looked at it for a long time and laughed until he wheezed. "Well," he said. "Now the hill has a proper map." Next morning the two rings caught the dawn together and threw their blue across the step, and the travellers, reading the lintel, slowed their pace and stopped to drink.