Red and black medical alert tattoo reading TYPE 1 DIABETIC on the inner forearm near the wrist, in a bold traditional-style outline.

Type 1 diabetic medical alert on a wrist

Lettering · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A red medical alert symbol with a black outline sits on the inner forearm near the wrist. The words TYPE 1 DIABETIC are lettered in white with black shading across the centre of the shape, with a small white emblem beside the text. The colour is mostly red and white against pale skin, with a soft, plain background of a purple cloth and a peach garment at the edges.

Lettering Forearm Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lettering had to be finished before the rain, so I was up a ladder on Ferris Street at half past two, with a tin of enamel red and a sable brush no wider than a fingernail. Mrs Okonedo at the chemist's had asked for the star of life above the door, the old six-armed cross, and then, as an afterthought, the words beneath it. I told her the words would have to be small, and she said small was fine as long as they could be read from the bus stop.

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Nobody walks Ferris Street after midnight except the bins and the night buses that never quite stop. I worked by the light of the shop's own sign, which hummed and flickered over my knuckles. I chalked the cross first, then filled each arm in red, one at a time, counting under my breath the way my father taught me for gilding. The black outline took longest. You can't hurry a shadow edge, he used to say, or it wanders off on you.

Around four a man came up the pavement with a paper bag from the all-night place by the station. He stopped and read the chalk without asking anything. Then he said his brother had one of those metal bracelets, and it had saved him once on a train platform when the people standing round didn't know what to do. He didn't want anything from me. He just wanted to say it to someone who was painting it.

By six the rain had come and the enamel was dry enough to touch. The manager unlocked the door, looked up at the cross, and said nothing for a long while. Then she asked whether the white would fade. I told her it would outlast the shop, and that was the only promise I ever make in paint.