Colour tattoo of a semicolon filled with a nebula of pink, green, teal and yellow with small white stars, outlined in bold black, on the forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Galaxy-filled semicolon tattoo on a forearm

Forearm · Colour · Photo

Two semicolon shapes sit one above the other, the smaller dot above the larger comma-shaped mark. Both are outlined in thick black linework and filled with a nebula-like galaxy of pink, purple, green, teal and yellow, with small white star highlights. The colour is bright and smoothly blended against plain skin and a dark leather background.

Forearm Semicolon Galaxy Nebula Star Punctuation

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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

The proof sheet came back with a semicolon where the printer had set a full stop, and Winifred Achterberg held it up to the gas lamp for a full minute before she swore. Page 214 of the Dunmore Star Atlas. Two nebulae, the Lantern and the Wake, had been split by a dot, and the dot had cut the sentence in half just as the sky had cut the two clouds apart.

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'It stays,' she told the foreman. 'Leave the dot where it is, and the comma under it. A sentence that isn't finished is still a sentence.'

He looked at her as if she had asked him to print the moon in green. But the atlas went out with its stop in the wrong place, and for years afterwards amateur observers wrote to the observatory asking why the Wake had a tail.

Winifred kept the first copy on her desk beneath the window. On clear nights she carried the brass refractor onto the flat roof and turned it on the pair of them, the small bright round one and the long curved one, and she counted the stars inside each as if they were words she had not yet decided to spend. The pink haze of the Wake ran down into the dark like ink that had not yet dried.

When she died her nephew found the atlas open at page 214, and beside the stop, in her small upright hand, a pencil note: not finished.