Tattoo on an arm of a semicolon and the words this too shall pass in black script, with a black bird silhouette and teal and pink splatter marks.

Semicolon and script with a bird and watercolour splashes

Lettering · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

The tattoo shows a large black semicolon at the upper left, with the words "this too shall pass" in black cursive script running across the centre. A solid black bird silhouette sits to the lower right, and the design is surrounded by loose teal and pink splatter marks. The black linework is bold and crisp, and the colour is applied as soft, bleeding washes across the skin.

Lettering Upper arm Semicolon Script Bird Splatter

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Now sit down, you lot, and mind the lift, it's been stopping between six and seven since Michaelmas. I'll tell you about Dorothy Vane on the eleventh floor of Harrow Point, and the blackbird that wouldn't leave her balcony.

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Dorothy had a habit of saying the same thing whenever the boiler packed in or the rent went up or her husband Ken came home smelling of the Crown. She'd tap the rail and say, this too shall pass, the way you'd tell a kettle to hurry. Nobody believed her, Ken least of all. But she meant it like a comma, not a full stop. A little bend in the sentence where you take a breath and carry on.

The summer the council sent the painters, the lads left their tins on the landing. Teal, and a pink like a boiled sweet. One of them, a lanky boy called Tomas learning the trade from his uncle, dripped the lot down the stairwell wall while he daydreamed about a girl from the chippy. Dorothy found him with his brush in the air and said, leave it, love, it looks like weather. He laughed and flicked the last of it at the window.

The bird came that autumn. Black as a dropped glove, it sat on her rail every morning and watched her peg out the sheets. She never fed it. She just said, you're still here, and it seemed to take that as an agreement.

When they carried Ken down the back stairs, the blackbird was on the rail. Dorothy didn't cry in front of the neighbours. She put her hand flat against the splashed teal on the wall, said the thing one more time, then went inside and put the kettle on, because a pause is only a pause if you pick the sentence back up.