Small fine line tattoo of a black semicolon with a purple butterfly on the wrist, shown on a clenched hand.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Semicolon and butterfly on a wrist

Fine line · Other · Mixed · Photo

A small tattoo on the wrist shows a solid black semicolon with a purple butterfly resting above and to the right of it. The linework is thin and clean, and the butterfly wings have soft purple shading. The photograph is taken close up against a plain light background, with a fist visible below the tattoo.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You learn the lock keeper's trick on the Oxford Canal the summer your father's boat, the Mabel Ruth, sinks a sack of coal at Hillmorton. Nobody tells you how to hold the windlass, so you watch the water climb the gate and count the paddles under your breath, one, two, the way he counts the years he has left on the cabin roof.

Keep reading

Your father writes everything in a green logbook: locks passed, loads delivered, the weather. Where he cannot decide whether a day is finished, he leaves a full point over a comma, a half-stop, and carries on the next line as if nothing had paused. You asked him once what it meant. He said it meant the sentence wasn't over, only resting, and that a good bargee never ends a journey on a stop when there's still a lock ahead.

On the last morning at the wharf, a purple butterfly lands on the tiller, bold as a stamp, and refuses to leave while you untie the mooring line. You let it ride with you to the lock. The gates swing open. You step onto the beam, the water drops away below, and you realise the stop in the logbook was never a full stop at all. You take the pen from his pocket, press the line into the book and add the curl of a tail beneath it, and the book goes on.

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