Small black fine line lotus flower tattoo with a semicolon at its centre, placed on the inner wrist and forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Lotus and semicolon on the inner wrist

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A small black tattoo of a lotus flower outline sits on the inner wrist, with a solid semicolon shape at its centre. The linework is fine and the semicolon's dot and tail are filled with stippled grey shading. The ink is black only, set against pale skin on a tiled floor, with the design shown centred and in sharp focus.

Fine line Botanical Forearm Lotus Flower Semicolon Punctuation

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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

Brother Anselm taught me that a full stop is a door shut behind you, but a semicolon is a door left ajar so the draught can keep moving through. He said it over the vellum in the scriptorium at Saint Cuthric's, where the ink froze in the jar come December and we thawed it against our ribs. I was nineteen and thought he was making a sermon out of spelling.

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The leaf I was given to copy that winter was not in any psalter I knew. Abbot Harrow wanted the margins redone before the damp got into them, and in the lower corner someone long dead had drawn a lotus, petals folded like a shut hand, with a small curved stroke sitting in its heart. Anselm said it marked a breath to be taken after the flower opened. I asked where a flower like that could come from in our valley, where nothing grows in water so clean. He only laughed and told me to mind my own pen.

I understood better in the spring of the flood. The lower field went under, the mill wheel stopped, and Brother Cuthbert, who had been failing since Michaelmas, was carried into the infirmary and did not come out. I sat beside his bed with a half-finished page and could not write the full stop the sentence wanted. So I left it open, a semicolon with nowhere to go, and went back to the scriptorium the next morning because the abbey still needed its books.

When the water fell, the marsh lilies came up pale through the silt, one by one, as if someone had counted them. I drew that lotus again in the margin, hook of a tail and all, and left the line beneath it unfinished for whoever came after to pick up.