Black typewriter-style lettering reading rise up followed by a large semicolon, tattooed on the inner wrist.

Rise up semicolon on the wrist

Lettering · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A small black tattoo of the words rise up in a typewriter-style serif font, followed by a bold semicolon. The lettering and semicolon are solid black with clean edges and no shading. The tattoo sits on the inner wrist against plain skin, with a wooden surface blurred in the background.

Lettering Forearm Semicolon Text Word

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mrs Abbott's Imperial had a semicolon key that stuck, so every letter Nell typed for the mill office came out with a little black mark where a full stop should have been, and Mr Hollis complained about it every Monday. "Finish your sentences, Miss Pryce," he said, tapping the carriage return with a pencil. "Nobody reads a letter that hangs in the air."

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Nell said nothing. She had learnt that a sentence could pause without ending, if you let it. The ribbon was old and the letters came out grey at the edges, the way the windows looked after a winter of coal smoke. She kept a sheet in the drawer under the machine for practice, and on it, over and over, she typed the same two words and a mark: rise up;

Then the strike came in the spring. The office emptied of everyone but the typists, and the typists were asked to write to the families on the lists. Nell wrote them all, one after another, and each letter ended with the stuck key, a small dark pause where the sentence went on in the reader's own head. Mrs Abbott's sister in Todmorden wrote back to say she had read Nell's letter aloud three times at the kitchen table. The third time she stopped at the mark and waited, and the baby in her arms kicked, and she carried on.

Nell kept the sheet. Years later the mill was a shell and the road ran past its gates, and a man walking his dog found her paper folded inside a jam jar under the wall of the old wash-house, the ink gone soft. He read the words and put it back where it was, because it did not need a full stop to mean what it said.