Two small black and grey tattoos on the hand: a solid semicolon on the left and a fine line outlined diamond on the right.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Semicolon and diamond on the hand

Fine line · Hand · Black and grey · Photo

A black and white close-up of two small tattoos on the skin of a hand, with a solid semicolon on the left and a tiny outlined diamond with facet lines on the right. The linework is fine and clean with no shading, and the soft background shadows and dark fabric at the bottom of the frame frame the skin.

Fine line Geometric Hand Semicolon Diamond Punctuation Minimal

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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

Mairead had been setting type on Inish Coll for eleven winters, and the press in the back of the post office was older than the harbour wall. The last ferry brought a crate of sorts from a foundry in Glasgow that had shut its doors, and in it was a single semicolon, cast in lead, its dot worn soft by someone else's thumb. She held it up to the window and the light came through the gap in the shutter.

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Old Tormod, who kept the accounts for the co-op, said a semicolon was a full stop that had decided to be polite. He said it the way he said most things, looking at the sea rather than at her. The island had only ever printed notices: tide tables, the ferry timetable, the names on the chapel board. Nobody wrote long sentences here, and nobody needed to hold a breath between two halves of a thought.

Ruth, who ran the chandlery and had come over from the mainland with a box of crystal and a bad marriage, wanted a diamond printed on the back of the new menu cards. Mairead found an old brass fleuron in the drawer, faceted like a cut stone, and inked it up. The first card came off the press crooked. She pulled the sheet, looked at the faint outline of the diamond and the semicolon she had slipped in beside the price of the crab, and laughed for the first time since the winter.

By spring the cards were pinned to every noticeboard on the island and tucked under teacups. Nobody asked what the mark meant. It sat between the things that had already happened and the things still to come, and that seemed enough for a place where the boat did not always run. Mairead left the press unlocked after that, in case anyone wanted to add a line.