Colour wash lettering tattoo reading Just breathe with two black semicolons and small birds, on the inner wrist and forearm.

Just breathe script and semicolons on a wrist

Lettering · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A black script reading "Just breathe" runs across the centre, flanked by two solid black semicolons on the left and a small cluster of tiny birds or dots above the text. Behind the linework, soft horizontal bands of pink, purple, teal, green and yellow ink fade into the skin like a watercolour wash. The photograph is taken straight on, with the design filling most of the frame.

Lettering Forearm Semicolon Script text Bird Watercolour wash

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit down, sit down, you're letting the cold in. Yes, that one by the bollard with the chipped mug. Now. You want the one about Meg Harrow and the half-stops in her father's ledger? Everybody in Porthgwidden knows some version of it, and every version gets the birds wrong.

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Her father kept the ferry log for thirty-one years, and he never once wrote a full stop while the boat was still out. He used a semicolon. Crossing started at six; wind backing west; one passenger, seasick; and then the line just carried on, the way a man's breath carries on when he's only pausing to fill his chest. Meg found the book at fourteen, when the boat was sold and the shed was being cleared out. She thought the half-stops were pen slips and nearly threw the lot on the fire.

Then there were the terns. Every August a flock came in off the bar and sat along the slipway rail in a row, little grey stitches in the air, and her father would stop whatever he was doing, count them with one finger, and say the same two words under his breath. Meg asked him once what he was saying. He told her he was reminding the sea that it could wait a minute, and that a body could too.

So Meg took the ledger out on the first still morning after the sale, when the bay went the colour of old sherbet, pink then teal then a yellow that hurt your eyes to look at. She sat on the rail with the terns and wrote one line of her own. It ended in a semicolon, not a stop. Then she sat there until the sun cleared the headland, breathing the way he'd taught her, and nothing in the whole bay needed finishing yet.