Small black semicolon tattoo on the skin behind a person's ear, with ear piercings visible above it.

Semicolon tattoo behind the ear

Neck · Black and grey · Photo

A close-up of the side of a person's head, showing a small solid black semicolon tattooed on the skin directly behind the ear. The mark has a simple, clean outline with a solid dot and comma shape and no shading. The ear has two metal piercings, and dark hair frames the soft-focus background, with the ear and neck filling most of the frame.

Neck Semicolon Punctuation

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

Sit closer, little one, where the lamp can reach you. You want to know why old Ambrose Teal stopped his pen halfway down the page? Then listen. He kept the registers in the harbour town of Saltcombe, where every ship's name and every debt went down in his round, careful hand, and the fishwives trusted him because he never once blotted a line.

Keep reading

One wet March a widow came to his counter with a letter for her son at sea. She wanted it to end plainly, with a full stop after the words Come home, the fire is lit, as though the boy's future were settled and there was nothing more to say. Ambrose dipped his nib and set down a dot, then a little curled tail beneath it. The widow frowned across the wood. "That is not how a letter ends," she said. "No," said Ambrose, "it is how a letter waits."

The son did not come home that spring, nor the next. Ambrose kept the letter in his drawer among the tallies, and every year at Michaelmas he took it out, read the open sentence, and put it back. The gulls grew fat on the quay and the town forgot the widow's name.

Then one autumn a young man with a sea-bag and salt in his beard walked in and asked for the register of the Sallow Gull. Ambrose gave him the letter instead. The man read it under the lamp, and his lips moved over the half-finished sentence, and then he read the rest of it aloud, because the rest had been waiting for him all along.