Black lettering reading diabetic in a typewriter style, with a thin arrow below it that has a yellow tip, on the inside of a wrist.

Diabetic word and arrow on a wrist

Lettering · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A close photograph of the inside of a wrist with the word diabetic in black, typewriter-style lettering. A fine black line runs beneath the word and ends in an arrowhead with a small yellow tip. The background is a blurred green leafy plant, and the tattoo sits centrally in the frame.

Lettering Forearm Word Arrow Text

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Nell, the snow has shut the Hollin Gate road since Tuesday, so there is nothing to do but sit by the boiler and write to you on Father's old typewriter, which I have been coaxing back to life with a pencil and a great deal of swearing. The carrier says the drifts won't clear before Thursday. Mrs Pargeter has the back bedroom and a parrot that repeats the price of coal, and the Tollards have been playing cribbage in the hall since breakfast with a fury I am beginning to admire.

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The machine came up from the cellar with the rest of the lost property, a dry ribbon and a sticking carriage. I inked the ribbon again with the blacking tin from the stables, and now every key bites clean, except the one that makes the little arrow at the end of my practice lines. It sends the carriage back the wrong way every time. Last night I typed a full page of nonsense to test it, and the same word kept surfacing at the foot of each sheet, neat and capitalised, as if someone had been waiting in the cellar to say it.

I asked Mr Tollard what he made of it. He squinted at the page over his cards and said it looked like a label off a jar of plum preserve, and then he laughed at himself and went back to his hand. I did not tell him I had started to think of the arrow as a sort of compass. Every line I type ends pointing the same way, past the stables and out through the gate toward the road.

So I have set the sheet on the windowsill, where the morning sun will catch the yellow of my pencil mark. When the drifts go, I will walk down to the post office with this letter and the typewriter under my arm, and I will see which way the road is pointing.