Two small black semicolon tattoos, one on the back of a hand and one on the inner wrist, shown side by side.

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Matching semicolon tattoos on hand and wrist

Hand · Black and grey · Photo

Two hands are pressed together so that a small semicolon is visible on the back of the left hand and another on the inner wrist of the right arm. Both marks are solid black ink with crisp, even edges and no visible shading. The skin is light and the background is soft and out of focus, which keeps attention on the two simple symbols.

Hand Forearm Semicolon Punctuation Symbol Matching tattoo

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Snow had been falling on Carrick Pass since Tuesday, and the gatehouse ledger had grown a column of blank days. Edie Lusk sat at the stove with the last inch of pencil, writing to her brother in the valley while the wind worked at the shutters.

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Their father had taught them the semicolon when they were small enough to be carried over the col on a sheep's back. A full stop, he said, was a door shut in someone's face. A comma was a man pausing to catch his breath. A semicolon was the harder thing: a stop that refused to let go, that said the sentence was finished in its meaning but not yet in its road. Edie and Tom had used it in every letter since Tom went down to the mills at sixteen. Full stop meant the pass was closed for good. Semicolon meant wait, I am still coming.

The runner, a boy called Alfie Dunn with frost in his eyelashes, came up at dusk with Tom's reply folded inside an old tobacco tin. The lower bridge at Rennet had gone, Tom wrote, and the river was too high to ford. He would come when the thaw let him. Keep the lamp lit. At the end of the page, after the last instruction, there was a semicolon and nothing else.

Edie read it twice by the lamp. Then she took up the pencil and wrote the day's entry: snow to the sill, wind from the north-west, one runner received. At the foot of the line she made the same two marks her father had shown her, a dot and a tail, and sent Alfie back down before the light went, so that whatever came up the pass in spring would find the sentence still open.