Small colour tattoo of a butterfly with teal and lilac wings and a semicolon for its body, placed on the inner wrist.

Semicolon butterfly on a wrist

Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A small butterfly tattoo on the inner wrist, with its body formed by a black semicolon and two curled black antennae. The wings are outlined in solid black and filled with teal, lilac and pale blue panels with white highlights. The design sits centrally on a plain, softly lit section of skin against a blurred wooden background.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Imre, the ship's library finally gave up the last of the old punctuation, and I have been sitting with the semicolon all morning. The archivists say it joined two sentences that could have stood alone but chose not to. Nobody on Halcyon Reach writes like that now. We speak in full stops, short and loud, the way the hull alarms do.

Keep reading

Yesterday I found a scrap of printed card in a sealed drawer of the hydroponics office, pale blue, with a butterfly drawn on it. Its body was one of those little commas with a dot above, and two curled lines rose from the dot like antennae. Someone had coloured the wings in teal and lilac, carefully, inside the black outlines. Underneath, in handwriting too neat to be a first draft, it said: not the end. I know you will tell me it is sentimental. I do not care.

I took the card to Mother Oyelaran in the greenhouse, and she turned it over twice before she laughed. She said her own grandmother had kept a drawing like that pinned above the bread oven, and that it had meant you were still in the middle of something you had not finished. Then she told me to put the card back where I found it, because the people who leave notes like that always want to be found by someone who will keep going.

So I am keeping going. The seedlings are up in rows of eleven. I have started a second letter for your daughter with a semicolon at the end of its first line, and I am leaving it open on purpose.

Write back soon. Tell me what the pause feels like from where you are.

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