Colour tattoo on a forearm showing a teal watercolour Star of Life with an orange snake around a black staff, and the script words Diabetic and Type 1 Insulin.

Star of Life and diabetic script on forearm

Lettering · Forearm · Colour · Photo

The tattoo shows a Star of Life medical symbol with a black staff and an orange snake coiled around it, set on a teal watercolour wash. The script word Diabetic sits above the symbol and Type 1 Insulin sits below it, both in black linework. The photo is taken straight on, with the design filling the centre of the frame against plain skin.

Lettering Forearm Snake Staff Script

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit down, you, and mind the bin, because this is the one about the night the lights went out on Ward Seven. Dennis Overy had been porter there for forty years, and he swore the staff painted on the wall of the linen store had a snake on it that only woke after midnight. Teal paint on the star, black wood, and the snake the colour of a boiled carrot, Dennis said, though he never once touched it to find out.

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On the night of the storm the generator coughed twice and died. The corridor went black except for the green exit sign, and somewhere past the sluice a trolley started rolling on its own. Nurse Pell shouted for a torch. Dennis brought his own, a lamp with a cracked lens, and he walked the corridor the way his father had walked the lanes, counting fence posts under his breath. Every fridge on the ward had a small light, and each light was a promise somebody had made to somebody else.

By three the power was back and the snake had not moved, though Dennis insisted he saw its tongue flick at the cabinet by the medicine room. Nobody argued. Pell pulled the chart for bed nine, found the handwriting shaking, and wrote the figures down properly for once. The old porter sat on an upturned crate, unwrapped a cough sweet and said nothing more about it.

In the morning Dennis pinned a paper star to the fridge door with a drawing pin. Underneath, in pencil, he wrote the time the lights went out and the time they came back. He said that was the only tale worth telling from a night shift, the one where somebody wrote it down.