Fine line black heart outline with a small semicolon at its lower right, tattooed on the inner wrist.

Heart outline with semicolon on wrist

Fine line · Other · Black and grey · Photo

A small heart outline in thin black linework sits on the inside of a wrist, with a semicolon placed at its lower right edge. The lines are even and unshaded, and the ink is dark against the skin. The tattoo is centred in a close, straight-on photo, with a coloured, glittery fabric visible in the background.

Fine line Other Heart 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

Right, sit down, the bench is warmer than it looks. You want the story of the ticket clerk at Thornwick Halt, and you'll have heard it wrong already, so listen. Her name was Ada Penrose and she sold tickets from a hatch no bigger than a bread bin. Every morning at ten to six the milk train came through without stopping, because the signal had been painted green by mistake in 1911 and nobody ever bothered to fix it.

Keep reading

She kept a ledger for the timetable, and in the margin she kept her own small notes. Every time a stopping train ran late she drew a little mark. The one she used most was a heart with a stub of a tail at its lower corner, a point and a dot. Her brother Tom had taught her that. He said a full stop was a door shut, and a semicolon was a gate you left ajar so you could come back through it. He sent her a postcard from the Somme with one of those marks on it and nothing else.

Ada kept that gate ajar for thirty-one years. Ticket hatch, rain, the milk train, the green signal that never changed. Each January she drew the mark again on the first page of the new ledger, small and neat, and the porter, who had known her since they were both children, stopped asking what it meant.

The year the line closed, a stranger got off the last train and asked for a single to nowhere in particular. She wrote it out, folded the slip, and told him the trains would run again. She was wrong about that, but only by a few decades. Ask at the buffet and they'll show you the ledger. Mind the step.