Close view of a hand with red nails showing a small black fine line cross tattoo on one finger and a black semicolon tattoo on the adjacent finger, against a white background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Cross and semicolon tattoos on fingers

Fine line · Hand · Black and grey · Photo

A hand with red painted nails is raised against a plain white background, with two fingers held apart. A small black cross is drawn in thin, even linework on the side of one finger, and a solid black semicolon sits on the neighbouring finger. The ink is black only, and the simple, centred composition keeps both small tattoos clearly in view.

Fine line Hand Cross Semicolon Finger Hand

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Nell,

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The chaplain on the Carrow Bay has a habit of stopping mid-hymn to scratch at the ink on his knuckles, so I have decided not to ask him about the cross he keeps drawing on the back of the menu cards. He says it is for the men who go over the side in the Bight. Nobody has gone over since we left Freetown, which he takes as proof of something, though I'm not sure what.

The mail room is still behind. Thirty-one sacks for Cape Town, and a bundle of your letters that I held back until the quartermaster had finished his tea. You wrote that Father has stopped going to the allotments. Do not let him sell the greenhouse. Tell him I said so, and tell him I am not writing that out of sentiment, only out of spite for the man who would buy it.

Here is what happened at the crossing of the line. Mr Hale, who keeps the printing press under a tarpaulin, asked me to set a notice for the ship's paper, and I could not decide how to end it. A full stop felt like giving up. So I set a semicolon, which is a stop that promises the sentence is not finished yet. Hale laughed and said it was the most hopeful piece of type he had handled in a year. We pinned the proof to the board beside the cross.

I will be home by the Michaelmas tide if the coal holds. Keep the lamp lit at the end of the lane. I have not decided how this letter ends either, so I will leave it open, the way Hale taught me, and you will have to take the open end as a promise.

Yours, with some hope, Tom