Small solid black semicolon tattoo behind a person's ear, shown from the side with a cartilage piercing and brown hair.

Semicolon tattoo behind the ear

Other · Black and grey · Photo

A close view from behind the ear shows a solid black semicolon, made of a dot above a comma-shaped mark, set on the skin behind the ear. The lines are bold and simple with even black ink and no shading. The skin is pale and lit softly, with a metal barbell piercing in the upper ear and brown hair framing the top of the frame.

Other Semicolon Punctuation Ear Hair

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 Tom, the tide tables went to press this morning with a semicolon missing from the third line, and old Fenn stood over the forme swearing like a deckhand. Slack water at the Pelham Quay is at ten past four, and without that small pause between the two facts the printer's boy would have read them as strangers. Half the cockle boats would have gone out on the wrong ebb.

Keep reading

I reset the line myself, letter by letter from the case, because I wanted my own hands on it. The semicolon is the fussy one of the bunch. It is a full stop that has changed its mind, a dot sitting over a comma's tail, and nobody in the shop agrees on where it belongs. Fenn says the men who draft Admiralty notices use it like a held breath. I think he is right, though he will not admit I said so.

On Thursday a woman from the chandlery came in with a card for her son's christening and asked me to set one line of scripture with the stop in a particular place. She stood by the window the whole time, reading each letter as I picked it up, and when I finished she said it sounded like someone deciding not to leave. I did not argue. She paid in coppers and took the proof home folded inside her glove.

I have kept the broken semicolon from the drawer, the one with the chipped tail, and put it in the tin beside my bunk. When you come back up the quay in October I will press it into your palm and you can tell me where the sentence ought to go on. Yours, Ned.