Heart outline with semicolon on the wrist
Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo
A small heart outline in black ink sits on the inner wrist of a light-skinned hand resting on a wooden floor. The single-weight linework is thin and even, and a semicolon is placed inside the lower right curve of the heart. The tattoo is shown in sharp focus against soft, blurred floorboards, with the fingers visible at the top of the frame.
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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction
Tuesday, 14 March. Father has gone across to the mainland on the Maid of Harrow with the mail sack and his bad knee, and I am left with the lamp log. He taught me the hand before he taught me to swim: date, wind, sea, glass, and then the remarks column, where a keeper writes what the weather did not.
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He never put a full stop in the remarks. Mother used to tease him that he was too stubborn to finish anything. What he used instead was the semicolon, one dot set over another, a sentence that promised more to come. Wind backing south-west; sea running high; lamp trimmed; Cormac Rowe's boat not yet in. Every night he left the line open like a gate.
Last night the glass dropped hard, and I wrote the usual, and then I sat with the pen above the page for an hour because I did not know how to close it. The boat was not in. The sea was not down. So I made the two dots, carefully, the way he did, and left the sentence hanging for the morning.
This morning the Maid came round the point at seven with the sack and my father standing in the bow, waving his hat like a fool. I wrote it in the remarks: Boat in; keeper well. Then I put the full stop, which felt like setting down a heavy bucket. In the margin, though, I drew a small heart around the old dots, and blotted it so the ink would not run.
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