Two small black semicolon tattoos in fine line style on the inner wrists of two people whose raised hands are visible in a car.

Matching semicolon wrist tattoos

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

Two people hold up their wrists side by side, each showing a small solid black semicolon tattoo. The linework is clean and simple, with no shading, and the two marks sit at a similar height on each wrist. The background is a dark car seat, with a green top on the left and a red top on the right, and the ink is the only colour in the frame.

Fine line Forearm Semicolon Punctuation Wrist Matching

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nobody on the night subs desk had ever sent back a semicolon for being wrong, which is why Hetty Crowther flagged the one in the obituary at quarter to two. It joined two sentences that had no business being joined. The dead man had been a bell-founder and a liar, and the sentence said both things in a way the editor did not want printed.

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Hetty and Ravi Sandhu had shared that desk for eleven years, and they had a rule about the mark: a semicolon was a breath you didn't take, a pause that promised the next clause was about the same thing. When the Calder Valley Courier was sold and its presses went to a scrapyard in Halifax, they walked up to a tattooist above a chip shop on Northgate and asked for the same small dot and comma, one stacked above the other, on the inside of the left wrist, where a pen rests.

The tattooist asked whether they wanted it sitting straight or leaning. Ravi said straight, because a sentence should stand up on its own. Hetty said it should lean on the one before it. They settled on level, and the lines went in clean and black with no shading, like a proof sheet before anyone argues about colour.

Ravi's obituary ran at the bottom of page nine the following week, semicolon intact, and nobody wrote in to complain. Hetty cut it out and pinned it above the kettle, and beneath it, in pencil, she wrote: the next bit is yours. The paper folded in March. They still hold their wrists up side by side whenever a sentence is worth the pause, and the rest of the room has long since stopped asking what it means.