Small black and grey semicolon tattoo with soft, splashed ink edges on the inside of a forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Semicolon in ink wash on a forearm

Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A small semicolon tattoo sits on the forearm, made of a dark dot and a curved comma-like stroke. The shading is soft and smoky with a wash-like, splattered edge and a few loose ink dots. The image is in black and grey against pale skin, with a dark background behind the arm.

Forearm Semicolon Punctuation Ink splash Dot

Find an artist for this

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 Margaret, the ink has run again. Mr Halloran left his brushes on the landing sill when he went down to the harbour, and the grey wash has crept under the window frame and dried in a bloom the shape of a cloud. Mrs Pryce says she will scrub it before the new lodgers arrive on Saturday, but I told her to leave it a day or two. I want to look at it for a while.

Keep reading

He came in September with one trunk and a tin of Chinese sticks that he ground on a saucer every morning, rubbing until the water went black as harbour mud. He was a compositor once, he said, before his hands went, and he still wrote out every letter by hand as though the press might come back for him. Last Tuesday I asked him about the little curved mark he kept drawing in the margins of the Gazette. He said it was a semicolon, the stop that tells you the sentence is not finished but has paused long enough to breathe.

I did not think much of that until this morning, when I found him on the front step with the gulls shouting over the bins and his sleeve pushed up, dabbing at a smudge with a damp cloth. He saw me looking and gave a short laugh, like a cough. 'Still wet,' he said. 'Give it a week and it will hold.'

I have left the sill as it is. It is not a full stop, Margaret, and I have decided I am not going to make it one.