Fine line black tattoo of a looping letter j with a semicolon beside it, above the word always in typewriter-style lettering on the inner wrist.

Semicolon and always on a wrist

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A close-up of a black ink tattoo on the inner wrist, showing a looping, cursive letter j with a semicolon to its right, with the word always set in a typewriter-style serif below. The linework is thin and even with solid black fill on the lettering. The ink is black on pale skin against a neutral background, and the design is centred and fills most of the frame.

Fine line Lettering Forearm Semicolon Always Script

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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

The Remington in the back parlour of Mrs Pellow's boarding house had a sticky J that you learned to strike twice, and you struck it twice the evening Jack Harrow came down with a sheet of foolscap folded into quarters. Since the war his hands had gone to rope and bandage, and he could no longer make a pen mean what he meant. He wanted letters typed for his sister in Leeds. He said he would dictate, and you were not to judge him for the pauses.

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"Tell Edie the boats are back in," he said, looking out past the net curtain at the grey water. "Tell her the gulls have had the bins again and Mrs Pellow blames the vicar's cat. Then put a stop there. Not a full one." You waited, fingers resting on the keys. "Put a semicolon. The sentence isn't finished. I'm only catching my breath." You typed the small dot above the curved tail, the carriage clacked back, and the line sat on the page like a door left ajar.

Weeks of letters followed, each one ending on that same stop, the thought broken off and picked up again on the next line. Then one wet night his voice ran out mid-sentence, and he said, "Write always, and then leave it." You typed the word in plain capitals, the way he had written it on the back of his cap box, and left the line open beneath it.

Edie's reply came in April, folded as neatly as his had been. She had kept every letter in a biscuit tin, she wrote, and read the semicolons aloud in her kitchen so the sentences would not end without him. "Tell him I am still reading," she wrote. "Tell him I am waiting at the end of it." You rolled a clean sheet into the machine, set the carriage where it sat, and did not type a full stop.