Close-up of a black semicolon and a black and red yin yang symbol beside the words 'My story is not finished' in a typewriter font, tattooed on a forearm.

Semicolon and yin yang with quote on forearm

Lettering · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A black semicolon sits beside a black and red yin yang symbol at the left, with the words 'My story is not finished' set in a typewriter-style font to the right. The black areas are solid and smooth, while the red fill is flat and even, with a slight glare across the skin. The lettering is crisp and evenly spaced, and the design is shown straight on across the middle of the frame.

Lettering Forearm Semicolon Yin yang Quote Text Typewriter font

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The scribe Tesh had been copying the same district record for nine years, one reed-cut line at a time, when the river rose and drowned the reed beds below the storehouse. He sat on the wall with wet clay tablets in his lap and watched the water take the willows. A ferry boy climbed the steps, dripping, and asked what he was writing. Tesh said he was writing down the year the river came. The boy asked whether it was finished. Tesh looked at the last mark he had made, a hooked stroke with a dot above it, and said no.

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Mother Sabe, who kept the ferry and had kept it longer than anyone could say, heard this from the boy and came up the steps herself. She sat beside him and told him how the river had once held two fish, one black as wet bark and one red as a cut pomegranate. They swam round and round the same deep pool, and wherever one stopped to rest, the other picked up where it had left off. People in the town said that was how the pool stayed full. Nobody had ever seen the fish reach the end of the circle, Sabe said, because the circle had no end.

Tesh went back inside and sat with the tablet until the lamp burned low. He did not write the year's flood into the record. He wrote only the hooked stroke, then the dot above it, then left the line open at the edge of the clay, with room for a word nobody had thought of yet. In spring the river went back to its bed. Someone found the tablet years later, read the open line, and carried it down to the ferry to ask Sabe's grandchildren what it meant.