Black and grey illustration of a raised fist with a small semicolon tattoo on the forearm, set against a pale blue background.

Raised fist with semicolon on forearm

Forearm · Black and grey · Flash

A bold vector-style illustration of a clenched fist raised high, with the forearm extending down out of frame. A small dark semicolon sits on the forearm just above the wrist, presented as a tattoo design. The artwork uses thick black outlines, grey shading and white highlights, set against a pale blue background.

Forearm Fist Semicolon Punctuation Arm

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Agnes Duff had set type for the Harbour Courier for thirty-one years, and no one had ever asked her to put a full stop where a sentence wanted to breathe. On the Thursday the strike copy came down from the editor's office, it read: The dockers have returned to work. Full stop. Agnes looked at the line, then at the foreman, who was already reaching for the lead.

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The stick in her hand was cold. She took a semicolon from the small case where the punctuation lived, a tiny piece of metal with its face worn smooth, and set it after returned, so the line read: The dockers have returned; the terms are not yet agreed. The foreman would not check until the proof came up. Nobody in that building ever read the commas.

The proof came up at six. Lionel Pike, the editor, stabbed at it with a red pencil, then stopped and read it twice. What's this for, he said. Agnes wiped her hands on her apron and said nothing. A semicolon, he said, as if naming a rash. It means the sentence isn't finished. No, she said. It means the men haven't stopped asking.

The paper ran it that way. Nobody complained, because nobody noticed except the men at the gate, who read it aloud to each other in the rain and laughed until one of them had to sit down on a bollard. Agnes kept that little piece of metal in her apron pocket for the rest of her working life, and it never once went back in the case.