Black ink drawing on white paper of a semicolon with three swallows flying from its top, shown as a tattoo design on a lined notebook page.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Semicolon and swallows design drawing

Black and grey · Flash

The drawing shows a bold black semicolon with a solid dot above and a curved tail below, with three small swallows in flight to its upper right. The linework is solid and silhouette-like, with no shading or gradients. The design is in black ink on a sheet of white paper placed on ruled notebook paper.

Semicolon Swallow Bird Dot Silhouette

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Now sit down, because my grandfather never told it standing, and he said a story told on your feet gets away from you like a gull off a chip. Forty years he fished out of Eyemouth on the Mary Ellen, and the thing he kept coming back to was the swallows. Not gulls. Swallows, three of them, which is wrong for the sea, because a swallow has no business past the headland in October.

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The night it happened the fleet was strung out under a black sky, and the Mary Ellen's engine coughed twice and quit. Grandfather stood at the wheel with the lamp in one hand and a sentence in his head he could not finish. He had told my grandmother he would be home for supper, and the sentence was that he was not, not yet, and the supper would have to wait. He said a man in that spot needs a pause in him, a place where the thing is held open and not shut, and that the swallows came down out of the dark and sat on the rail like punctuation.

They did not sit long. One dipped and went off low over the water, bearing north-east, and the second followed it, and the third hung over the stern until he had the lamp up and the wind in his face. Then it went too. He found the engine on the third pull. Half an hour later the light at Berwick swam into view, a full stop of yellow on the black, and he understood the birds had only been keeping the sentence going until he could see where it ended.

I still have the drawing he made on the back of a tide table, a dot above a curved tail with three small birds flying off to the right. He called it a semicolon. He said it meant the sentence isn't finished, that it isn't a stop, so mind where you put your breath. I never had the nerve to tell him he had the grammar wrong, and I suspect he knew it.