Black and grey photo of two small solid black tattoos, each a heart above a semicolon, on the ankles of two feet.

Matching heart and semicolon ankle tattoos

Ankle · Black and grey · Photo

The photograph shows two bare feet placed side by side, each with a small solid black tattoo of a heart sitting above a semicolon near the ankle. The shapes are simple, filled and evenly inked, with no shading or fine detail. The image is black and white, with a soft background and the feet filling most of the frame.

Ankle Heart Semicolon

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The ledger on the kitchen table is the one thing in the house that never freezes, so you write in it every night beside the range. Your father's hand stopped halfway down the January column, and you picked up the pen where he left it. He used to say a semicolon was a full stop that had decided to wait. You have never known what to do with that, so you copy the habit and leave things open.

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Snow shuts the lane by the second week of February. Ewes lamb in the top field with the wind cutting across it, and you walk the rounds with a lantern and a tally book tucked in your coat. Your brother Tom left for Leeds in the autumn with a promise to write. His letters come once a month, short, folded into feed merchant envelopes. Each one stops on a semicolon, as if he means to add something but the post van is already idling at the gate.

In March you find a tin of nibs at the back of the barn, and under it a sheet of paper with a heart drawn in solid ink and a comma pushed out of shape beside it. You work out what he meant. He has been doing the same sums in the city that you have been doing up here, each of you waiting on the other to finish a thought. You sit on an upturned bucket and laugh until the lantern gutters.

That evening you write back. You do not sign off. You leave the bottom of the page blank, a space for him to fill, and you post it at first light when the lane is clear enough for the van.