Colourful splashes of red, blue, green, purple and yellow surround two white semicolon shapes on the outside of an ankle.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Semicolon and colour splash on an ankle

Ankle · Colour · Photo

A close photograph of an ankle with a tattoo of two semicolon shapes, left as bare skin, surrounded by loose splashes of colour. The splashes are in red, blue, green, purple and yellow, with soft, feathered edges that look like watercolour paint. The composition is centred on the ankle against a plain, pale background.

Ankle Semicolon Splash Abstract

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, and keep your hands off the paint pots, they bite. You've all heard that the Carrick light went dark the winter the Maud Ellery failed to come home. That part's true. What nobody tells is about Tomas Wren, the typesetter in the back room of the Gazette, who could never bring himself to put a full stop on anything.

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He set every line of the parish paper by hand, letter by letter from the case, and when a sentence had two halves that belonged together but could not yet be finished, he used the little stop with the tail on it. A semicolon, he called it, the pause that holds a breath. The town thought him soft. When the Ellery went out, Jenny Mott came in with a notice for the front page asking for word of her man. She wanted it to say he was lost. Tomas would not set lost. He set it with a semicolon: the boat is out there; we are still watching.

Each night after that, he walked down to the harbour wall and painted the stop onto the lamp-house shutters, using whatever colours were left from the job printing. Red for the tide line, blue for the open sea, green for the marsh grass, purple for the squalls, yellow for the lamp. The paint ran where the damp got into it, and by March the splashes had spread across the whole wall like spilt dye on wet paper.

The Ellery came in on the first morning of April, slow under one patched sail, her crew wrapped in blankets. Tomas stood on the quay with paint to the wrist. Jenny asked him why he had never finished the sentence. He wiped his hands on his apron and said the best part of any sentence is the bit still waiting to be said, and then he went back up the steps to see if the lamp would light.