Lettering tattoo on a forearm reading ;IGY6, with a teal semicolon, black serif letters and a red number 6.

Semicolon and IGY6 lettering on a forearm

Lettering · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A close photograph of a lettering tattoo on the inner forearm, showing a teal semicolon followed by the black serif capitals I, G and Y and a red numeral 6. The letters have solid black fill with clean edges and the semicolon and 6 are filled in their own colours. The skin is plain and the tattoo sits centrally against a blue padded surface and blue tape in the background.

Lettering Forearm Semicolon Letter

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Nell, Mr Hobday made me reset the whole obituary column this morning because I had closed a sentence the copy wanted left open. He held the proof up to the skylight like a man checking an egg. "A full stop is a door shut," he said. "A semicolon is a door left on the latch, so the next line can walk through." I told him he sounded like the vicar, and he said the vicar had never once cost the firm a shilling over a comma.

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The composing room smells of linseed and hot metal. The sixth case along the wall holds the red sorts we keep for figures and feast days, and that is where Ivy Crane works, two frames down from me. She has set type here since before the war. Years ago she chalked a little code on the lid of her case, IGY6, which she says stands for "I'll get you by six", the arrangement the two of them had when they were girls on the night shift: walk home together or not at all. Nobody has asked her who the other girl was, and she has never offered.

Ivy didn't come in on Tuesday. Hobday sent her wages round by post with a note that said nothing. So I set the obituary myself, carefully, letter by letter from the cases, and when I reached the end of the paragraph I did not close it. I put in the small curved mark and let the line run on into the margin, where there was nothing yet to say.

At six I stood by the works gate with my bag on my shoulder and waited in the cold. The lamps came on along the canal one by one. The gate stayed open, the way Hobday leaves it when he expects someone late, and I kept my hand on the latch until the bell went for the last time.