Black fine line tattoo of a butterfly outline formed from a colon-like pair of dots and a semicolon, on the inner forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Butterfly outline made from punctuation marks

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A simple black outline of a butterfly in profile, with its wings drawn as a single line and its body formed by a dot above a semicolon-shaped mark. The linework is even and fine, with solid black ink and no shading. The photograph is taken straight on against pale skin, with the tattoo centred and a dark edge of fabric visible at the left.

Fine line Forearm Butterfly Semicolon Punctuation Outline

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The last box of type came down from the top shelf with a sigh of dust, and Ruth tipped the semicolons out onto the stone like seeds from a dropped packet. There were hundreds of them, worn soft at the tails from sixty years of hands. The works in Sheffield shut on Friday, and the landlord wanted the presses cleared by Thursday teatime, so everything was being sorted into crates that would go to a man in Halifax who collected old metal.

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Dennis had kept one job back for the final morning, a memorial card for a widow who had asked for a verse set by hand and nothing printed on a machine. Ruth read the lines twice at the frame. Two thoughts in the middle of the verse could have stood alone as sentences, but the widow had wanted them held together, leaning on each other. A semicolon would do that. She picked one up with the tweezers, then a dot, and set the dot above the curve of the stop to see what it made. The two little marks sat there on the composing stick, and she tilted her head until they became a wing, then a body, then something that might lift off the metal if she blew on it.

Dennis came over with his tea and said it looked like a moth someone had stood on. She told him to wait until it was inked. The proof came off the cylinder faint at the edges, then sharp, the outline of the butterfly printed in one clean line with the dot at its head.

She hung the sheet on the drying line by the window, where the light came in grey over the yard. The widow's verse ran down the page beneath it, held together by its stops, and the butterfly sat in the top corner as if it had been waiting to be set all along.