Two hands held together show black lettering tattoos on the inner wrists, one reading Live in script and the other reading SURVIVOR with a semicolon.

Live and survivor wrist tattoos

Lettering · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

Two inner wrists are held together, each carrying a small black tattoo. The left wrist shows the word Live in a flowing script with a thin, tapered stroke, and the right wrist shows the capitalised word SURVIVOR with a semicolon beside it. The ink is solid black on a light skin tone against a soft, blurred green background.

Lettering Forearm Semicolon Script Word

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mr Pryce cut the type case himself, so when the semicolon went missing from the B drawer nobody believed me. It was a small bent sort, a comma with its nerve gone, and it was the only one we had. Without it the Sheffield evening paper's obituaries came out clipped and shouting. I had set four hundred of them that spring, each one closing on a full stop, as if the people in them had simply finished.

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The apprentice was a girl called Maud Haigh, seventeen, who had come to us with a cough that wouldn't shift and a habit of sweeping the floor twice. On the Friday she came over with a mug of tea and a proof sheet and asked me what the mark was for. I told her a full stop says a thing is over and a semicolon says it isn't, not yet, there's more and it's joined on. She said that was a very Methodist view of punctuation. I said I'd been called worse by better printers.

She was off for three weeks after that, and the drawer filled up again without anyone remarking on the gap. When she came back, pale and thinner, she went straight to her frame and began locking up a page of practice slips. I didn't ask. At dinner I found the little bent sort in her apron pocket, still faintly inked, and I put it back in the B drawer without a word.

The next morning there was a slip pinned to the board in her careful capitals, the letters all standing upright, the one word SURVIVOR. Beside it, in the spot where a full stop would have gone, she had set nothing at all, so the line just ran on past the edge of the page, and I left it that way and pulled a proof for the wall.