Small watercolour-style tattoo of a black semicolon with rainbow splashes on the inner wrist, shown in a close photo of the forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Rainbow watercolour semicolon on a wrist

Forearm · Colour · Photo

A small tattoo of a black semicolon sits at the centre of a rainbow splash, with red dots scattered above and green and yellow flecks around it. The soft, blended colour fades from red through orange, yellow, green, blue and purple, while the semicolon is solid black with crisp edges. The tattoo is centred on the inner wrist, photographed straight on against a dark background.

Forearm Semicolon Rainbow Splash Dot

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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

Mam kept the dye-vats under the oaks where the village road gave up and became a track of roots. Nobody in Hollin Bottom could tell you why she chose that spot, only that the water ran clear there and the madder grew thick at the wood's edge. I was nine the summer I learned to stir, one hand on the paddle, the other wiping my nose on my sleeve, while she ground ochre into linseed on a slate.

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The trouble came from my brother's letters. Tom had gone to the coast for the herring season and wrote every Sunday on the back of ledger paper, and every letter stopped halfway down the page with a mark he never finished. A full stop would have meant he was done with us. A comma would have meant he was only thinking. He drew a dot, then a little curved tail beneath it, and left the rest of the sentence hanging like washing. Mam said it was the most honest punctuation she had ever read.

One Sunday the paddle slipped and a spill of colour went over the bank into the pots, red, then orange, then the whole rainbow of them tumbling together where the water boiled. I fished out a strip of calico and held it up. Mam laughed for the first time since Tom sailed, took the brush from its jar, and painted a black mark in the middle of the mess. Where the colours bled into each other, they looked like a shout that had decided to keep going.

Tom came home at Michaelmas with a bag of salt cod and no story, only a grin. He unfolded the cloth on the kitchen table and read the mark aloud as if it were a word. Then he asked what came next, and Mam said that was up to him, and handed him the pen.