Black fine line tattoo of a semicolon and a cross on the inner wrist, shown against green grass.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Semicolon and cross on the wrist

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A small black tattoo of a cross followed by a semicolon sits on the inner wrist of a raised hand. The linework is thin and simple, with solid black ink and no shading. The photograph is taken outdoors against dense green foliage, with dark painted nails and patterned legwear visible at the bottom of the frame.

Fine line Forearm Semicolon Cross Punctuation Wrist

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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

Sit down on that bench, love, and mind the mint, it bites when it's trodden. Now, you want to know about Amos Pell and his day-book. Forty years he kept it in the potting shed, every row sown and every frost written down in a hand like barbed wire. Each line ended with a full stop, neat as a peg, because that was how his mother had taught him to close a thing.

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The February after the great frost, he came out with the ink pot and found the whole bed of early peas blackened. He sat on the upturned bucket a long while. Then he took his pen and drew a cross through the row, clean and straight, the way you'd strike a name off a list. But when his hand went down to the full stop, it stopped short. It set down a dot with a little tail curled beneath it, and he sat staring at the mark like a man who has found a door in a wall he thought was solid.

That is a semicolon, and the old fellow never could explain it properly. He only said a stop was a choice, and he had not chosen to finish the sentence. So he wrote on beneath it: the soil is still warm two spades down, and the parsnips may yet keep. In April the parsnips did keep, and the peas came up through the crossed-out row as if they had read his book and disagreed with every word.

Every spring after, he left that little mark at the end of the frosted lines, and the garden went on talking in its own stubborn way. Mind your step on the way out, love. The gate sticks.