Small black dotwork tattoo of a semicolon inside a heart on the upper chest, beside a silver pendant on a chain.

Semicolon in a heart on the chest

Dotwork · Chest · Black and grey · Photo

A small heart outline filled with stippled dots forms the background for a semicolon in the centre. The shading is built from black dots that fade toward the edges of the heart, leaving the semicolon as pale skin. The photograph is taken close up, with the tattoo sitting just below the collarbone and a silver paw print pendant hanging at the top left.

Dotwork Chest Semicolon Heart Paw print Pendant Necklace

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Nell, Mr Pargeter has finally let me near the cases at the back of the shop, though only to sort the broken sorts into their boxes. You will laugh, but the thing I cannot stop turning over is the semicolon. Nobody here has cut a fresh one in eleven years. The old punch lives wrapped in a green flannel in the drawer under the composing stone, and when I asked why it was kept so carefully, Pargeter said a semicolon is a sentence that has been asked to wait.

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Yesterday a memorial card came in for a Mrs Ashworth, a small heart drawn on the proof in pencil with a dot for every place the ink should sit. Pargeter had me dab the whole heart in stipple, a thousand pinpricks of ink that grew thick at the centre and thinned to nothing at the edges, so the card looked almost like breath on glass. Then the semicolon went in the middle, and I was told to leave it white, because the paper would show through and do the work for us.

Mrs Ashworth came in this morning and asked for the mark to be struck out. A full stop, she said, would be kinder, a door shut properly rather than left ajar. Pargeter heard her out, then said the card would go out as it was printed, and she could take it up with the Almighty if she disliked it. She paid, and she left without taking the card.

I have kept the spoiled proof. Held to the window, the dots fade toward the edge of the heart and the semicolon sits in the middle like a gap a man has stepped across, not a wall he has built. I think I finally understand the flannel. Write soon, and tell Father the dog has not been fed by anyone but you.