Pen sketch of a tattoo design on lined paper showing a semicolon above the words INHALE and EXHALE, with two opposing arrows between them.

Inhale and exhale semicolon design sketch

Lettering · Black and grey · Flash

A hand-drawn pen design shows a semicolon beside the word INHALE in plain capital letters, with two arrows pointing in opposite directions and the word EXHALE below. The linework is simple and even, with hatched arrow fletching and a solid dot on the semicolon. The drawing is in dark ink on a pale sheet of ruled notebook paper, with the design centred in the frame.

Lettering Semicolon Arrow Text

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Old Dai Pritchard kept the big fan at Ynys Pit, and he kept it the way his father had, by the bell and the breath. When the cage came up he drew the air down the shaft, and when the men were below he let it out slow, so the galleries would not go stale. Nobody asked him why. The village schoolmaster asked once, and Dai took him down the stone stair to the fan house and showed him two belts running in opposite directions over the same wheel.

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"That's your stop and your go," Dai said. "You don't finish a shift by stopping the wheel. You ease it." That night the schoolmaster chalked a semicolon on the slate, a comma with a full stop perched on its back, and told the children it meant the sentence was not dead yet, only resting.

The winter the roof gave at the third level, the fan stopped with twelve men beneath it. Dai did not stop. He sat at the belt with his hands raw and kept the wheel turning at the pace of a man with a bad chest, in and then out, in and then out, for nine hours, until the rescue men broke through from the east side.

When they asked him afterwards what he had been thinking, he said he had been counting the gap between, because that was where the air was. The slate is still in the chapel vestry. Someone has rubbed the dot a little fainter every year, but the mark is there, waiting to be read as a pause.