A bold black brush-ink semicolon drawn on a plain white background, with no skin or body placement shown.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Brush-ink semicolon design

Black and grey · Flash

A semicolon is drawn in black brush-style ink on a plain white background. The dot is a dense, roughly circular blot with feathered edges, and the comma below has a tapering, ragged tail. The image is entirely black ink with no colour and no shading beyond the textured brush edges, and the design is centred with generous white space around it.

Semicolon Punctuation Brush stroke

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The guard at Varlin Bridge stamps the paper without looking up, so you have to say it twice: the name, then the town on the far bank where your sister's letter says she waits. He wants a reason. You give him the only one you carry, folded small in your coat: a sheet of foolscap with two sentences on it, one ending where your brother's life ended, one beginning where you hope yours will.

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Between them, in your sister's hand, sits a semicolon. She always used them. Your mother said it was because she could not bear to let anything finish, and your sister said a full stop was a door shut in someone's face. The mark is small and black, like a seed dropped on white paper, with a comma's tail that trails away as if the ink lost its nerve halfway down.

The guard reads the sheet twice. He does not know what it means. He turns it over, finds nothing there, and hands it back. "Next," he says, and you realise you have been holding your breath the way you hold it over a proof you have been asked to check, waiting for the error to show itself.

You step onto the planks. The river is loud beneath you. Halfway across, you take out the letter and read the line aloud, slowly, so the pause falls in the right place. The dot seems to swell in the wet light, and you understand that the sentence was never finished, only held open long enough for you to walk into it.