Close-up photo of a small solid black dot above a red semicolon tattoo on the inside of a wrist.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Black dot and red semicolon on the wrist

Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A close-up photograph of the inside of a wrist showing two small tattoos: a solid black dot above a solid red semicolon. Both shapes are filled with flat, even colour and have crisp edges, with no shading or fine linework. The skin is plain and fills most of the frame, with a dark background and a blurred workspace at the edges.

Forearm Semicolon Dot Punctuation

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

We were nineteen days out of Valparaíso when the purser brought down a notice that wanted setting before supper. Mr Ansell, who ran the ship's press in the forward hold, read it twice over his spectacles and said the sentence was wrong. 'It has two thoughts in it,' he said, 'and they are holding hands. Give them a semicolon, or they will fall over.'

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I had the red ink out already, the good stuff the chandler sold us for the ledgers. He wanted the dot black, the way the Admiralty wanted everything, and the tail red, because a tail, he said, is where a sentence keeps its breath. We pulled forty copies before the swell got up and the lamp swung and the type case slid across the stone, and I watched the notices go out pinned to every door on C deck.

Ansell died off the Horn in the spring, quiet in his bunk, with ink still on his thumb. The purser asked me to read the service, and I found I could not, so I read the notice instead, the one with the semicolon, because it was the last thing he had asked me to get right. Nobody on the deck understood it. Nobody needed to.

I still set that mark by hand whenever a sentence has to hold two things and not let go of either. Black above, red below, and a small held breath between them.