Fine line tattoo of a butterfly wing in black hatching beside a purple semicolon, placed on the ankle.

Butterfly wing and semicolon on an ankle

Fine line · Ankle · Mixed · Photo

A butterfly wing is drawn in black hatched and stippled lines, with a second wing section below it. To its right, a purple semicolon with a dot and a comma-shaped stroke sits as a separate element. The image is a close, slightly angled photo of skin with the tattoo centred on the frame.

Fine line Ankle Butterfly Wing Semicolon

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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

Mrs Hollis kept the type cases at the back of the Halifax print shop, and the semicolon sorts lived in the one compartment nobody else wanted to clean. Tuesday after Tuesday she dusted the little lead pieces, a stroke above a dot, counting them against the ledger, because the proprietor had once said a shop that lost its semicolons would soon lose its nerve.

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Then the Hendry boy came in with the proofs for the Calder Valley Chronicle obituary column. He had marked every semicolon in red pencil and written cut, cut, cut in the margin. Mrs Hollis took the pencil from him and sat down on an upturned crate. "Your sentence holds more than one thought," she said. "It's allowed to catch its breath before it goes on."

He laughed at her, but he left the proof behind. She set the paragraph by hand that night, the way her husband had taught her before the war took the hand that used to hold the stick. Each semicolon she placed with the care of pinning a wing to card, two thin marks that let two thoughts stand side by side without pretending they were one.

In the morning the boy found the page on the stone, inked and dry, every column intact. Nobody had cut a word. Beneath it, in the margin, she had pencilled a butterfly in quick hatched lines, its lower wing folded like a sentence waiting for the rest.