Black and grey hand-drawn design of an arrow, a semicolon and an infinity symbol on a textured grey surface with vertical lines.

Arrow, semicolon and infinity symbol

Black and grey · Flash

Three bold black symbols are drawn in marker or ink from left to right: an upward arrow with a feathered fletching at the base, a semicolon, and a looped infinity symbol. The strokes are thick and uneven, with solid fills on the arrowhead and semicolon dot and an outlined infinity loop. The symbols sit against a pale, textured grey background with faint vertical lines, in a plain black and white photograph.

Arrow Semicolon Infinity symbol Punctuation Sketch

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You learned to charge for stops in your first month at the Liverpool office, when the rate card still hung crooked beside the door and the foreman said a full stop cost the same as a word and a word cost a penny. So you learned to write without them. Every cable you sent ran on like a tide, and the men in Lagos and Halifax read them the way you read the weather, with their breath held.

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The cable that broke the habit came from a woman called Hester Vane, sending to her brother in Lisbon. She had written four sides of wandering news about the price of coal and a dead canary, and then she pushed a half-sheet across the counter with a mark drawn in the margin. It was a comma with a heavier head, and beside it a looping figure eight lying on its side. She wanted a pause, she said, not a stop. A place where a sentence could catch its breath and still be going.

There was no code for it. You tapped the stop, counted three beats of the key, and tapped the stop again, and it looked like nothing on the tape but it felt like a hand lifted off a shoulder. Then Hester drew an arrow at the very end, feathered at the base, pointing off the edge of the form, and said that was for her brother to know which way to answer. You sent it that way. The message left the building at a quarter past four and you never learned whether Tobias read it through to the bottom or stopped halfway to breathe.

You still have the blank form she left behind. Nobody paid for the extra stops, so you sent them yourself, at your own cost, every evening since, one pause and one arrow sliding off the page and into the wire.