Colour tattoo of a black semicolon with blue and pink trailing wisps above the words This too shall pass in black script on a forearm.

Semicolon and script quote on forearm

Lettering · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A black semicolon sits above a second, similar semicolon, each with blue and pink wisps trailing to the right, and below them the handwritten script reads This too shall pass. The semicolons have solid black dots and tails with soft, blended blue and pink shading around them. The photograph is taken straight on against a wooden floor, with the tattoo filling most of the frame.

Lettering Forearm Semicolon Script Quote Text

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You are up the ladder in Mrs Ferris's Bramley orchard when the light goes flat and gold in the last week of August. Dennis is shouting from below that the wasps have found the drops again. There is a bruised windfall in your apron pocket and a letter in the other, unopened since Tuesday, with a Hereford postmark. You don't open it. You count the rows instead, the way your mother counted stitches.

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That night the sky over the Malvern side is clearer than you've seen it in years, and Dennis brings a flask out to the gate. "Comet," he says, pointing. A smudge of blue with a tail the colour of pink ribbon drags low over the hedge. Then a second one, smaller, following at a distance like a dog that won't quite come to heel. Dennis says they're called a pair. You say nothing, because you're thinking about the letter.

You read it on the back step. Your brother has written three lines and stopped, the way he always stopped, halfway through a sentence he couldn't bear to finish. You read it twice. Then you take the pencil from your apron and, on the back of the envelope, add a mark after "you'll be fine" that is not a full stop. Two dots, one tail. A semicolon, which means the sentence isn't over yet.

In the morning you walk the rows with the letter folded in your pocket and the picking bags swinging from your shoulders. The comet has gone, but the trees are heavy and the light comes through them in long stripes of blue and pink, and you tell Dennis you'll be back for the Bramleys next week.