Black script lettering reading DiabeT1c, with the T1 in blue, and a blue outlined circle beneath it, tattooed on the inner wrist.

Script DiabeT1c lettering with blue circle on wrist

Lettering · Other · Mixed · Photo

A close photograph of a hand held palm up, showing a tattoo on the inner wrist. The script lettering reads DiabeT1c, with the black letters outlined in a clean, even line and the T1 filled in blue. A simple blue outlined circle sits centred below the text, and the subject is framed against a teal surface.

Lettering Other Script Lettering Circle

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mr Okafor wouldn't let me touch the first letter until I had cut the black with a little brown. "Pure black lies in the sun," he said, tapping the tin with his brush handle, then went back to the gold leaf on the chemist's window where DISPENSING had begun to lift. I was seventeen and had swept the hair off his floor for a year. The shop smelled of size and turpentine, and the radio was always murmuring about the shipping forecast.

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That spring's job was a fascia board for Mrs Adeyemi's dry cleaner's on Harrow Road. She had cut the wording from a 1950s tea tin: Bright & Steady, in copperplate with a fat ampersand. Beneath it she wanted a plain blue ring, the colour of the sky just before rain clears. I asked her why a ring. She said the man who had kept the shop before her marked every shirt he pressed with a small blue dot so nobody would mix up the Sunday collars, and she wanted the dot made bigger, so people could see it from the bus.

Okafor let me paint the ring alone. "Hold the brush like a pencil," he said, "and let the circle close on its own. Don't chase it." My first went lopsided. I wiped it with a rag and tried again while the varnish cooled. By the third it was round enough. He stood behind me with his arms folded and said nothing for so long I was sure I had ruined the board.

On the Saturday it went up, and Mrs Adeyemi stood on the pavement with her hand over her mouth. She read the words aloud, then looked at the blue ring and nodded, as if it had answered something she had been asking for years. Okafor took the rag from my pocket, reached up, and rubbed away the smudge of blue on my own thumb, the only mark I had left on the job.