Black and grey script tattoo reading breathe with a semicolon on the inner wrist, shown in two black and white photos from the palm side and the back of the wrist.

Breathe semicolon script on a wrist

Lettering · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo reads the word breathe in a flowing cursive script, followed by a semicolon, and sits across the inner wrist. The linework is fine and even, with solid black ink and no shading. The two black and white photographs show the same wrist, one with the hand raised and palm turned towards the camera, and one showing the back of the wrist.

Lettering Fine line Forearm Breathe Semicolon Script Wording

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mr Okonedo never let anyone hurry a line of type. He stood at the case at the back of the Harbour Press with his spectacles pushed up into grey hair, and when I asked why a full stop would not do, he took a semicolon from the box, held it up to the gas lamp and called it the most honest mark we had. "A full stop shuts the door," he said. "A comma nods to the man behind you. The semicolon says, keep standing there, I am not finished."

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He had set ten thousand handbills in forty years: ships sailing, sales of pianos, a lost spaniel, a chapel supper. The word breathe was not one a printer set often, so when a woman came in one wet March with a folded sheet of verse in a gloved hand, I thought she wanted a funeral card. She wanted the word in a running script, the letters joined like wind through reeds, and one semicolon at the end, no bigger than a seed.

Mr Okonedo asked her to say it aloud before he cast a single sort. She did, very quietly, and he nodded as if she had passed a test. We spent the whole afternoon on that one small line, shaving a hair from the spacing until the tail of the final e sat just right against the mark. When she came back for it she did not thank us. She read it under the lamp for a long while, then asked if she might keep the spare semicolon, and Mr Okonedo tipped it into her palm as though it were a coin of some value.

I still have the proof sheet pinned above my own case. The ink has gone the colour of weak tea, but the little mark at the end is still there, holding the line open, and I have never once put a full stop on a sentence I was not sure of.