Fine line tattoo on the inner forearm showing a black anchor, a semicolon, a solid dot and a looping line ending in a lilac teardrop.

Anchor and semicolon tattoo on a forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

The tattoo shows a black anchor with a semicolon and a solid dot, joined by a thin looping line that ends in a lilac teardrop shape. The linework is fine and clean, with solid black fills on the anchor, dot and semicolon. Colour appears only in the lilac teardrop, set against pale skin on a plain, softly lit background.

Fine line Forearm Anchor Semicolon Dot Line Teardrop

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dilys Harker had been told the semicolon was fussy. The sub-editor at the Scarborough Mercury drew a pencil line through it every Thursday, and every Thursday she put it back, because a full stop would have finished the sentence about the Ellen Rose before anyone was ready to finish it.

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The trawler had gone out on the Tuesday tide with four men aboard. Only three had come home on the Thursday, and the paper wanted the names by noon. Dilys wrote the notice in lilac ink, the only bottle left at the stationer's on Quay Street, and when a fat drop fell from the nib and spread on the proof sheet she let it dry rather than blot it. She set a small anchor in the margin, the kind the harbour men carved on bench ends, and between each name she drew a fine loop, so the list ran on like a rope paid out over a rail.

The sub-editor came in with his pencil already raised. He looked at the lilac drop, then at the full stop she had set after the first name, then at the semicolon after the second. 'We can't print a dot like that,' he said. 'It will read as if they've stopped.' Dilys took the proof back and said nothing, because she had already decided that nothing about those three men would stop on her page.

The notice ran on the Friday with every mark where she had put it. Tom Reay's name was the last in the list, and it sat after a semicolon. A month later a postcard came from Whitby with one word on it, Tom, in a hand that leaned badly to the right. Dilys pinned it above her desk beside the chain she had bought for a shilling, and she kept the lilac ink for the next notice she would have to write.