Small black fine line semicolon tattoo on the side of a finger, held up against a blue and white patterned fabric, in fine line style on the hand.

Semicolon tattoo on a finger

Fine line · Hand · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of a hand with a small, solid black semicolon tattooed on the side of one finger. The linework is thin and crisp, with no shading, and the mark sits near the knuckle. The pale pink nail polish and blue and white patterned fabric in the background make up the rest of the composition.

Fine line Hand Semicolon Punctuation Finger Minimal

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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

Harlan had been painting the same stretch of Route 9 for thirty-one years, and the county had never once paid him to finish a sentence. The signs said things like CATTLE XING and WATER 40 MI, short and blunt, the way the desert liked its news. So when Mrs Okafor from the Ocotillo Motel brought him a card with her wording for the new sign at the bend, he read it twice with his glasses pushed up and his thumb black with enamel.

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"It says Slow down, the road is loose; the river is gone," he said. "Is that two signs or one?"

"One," she said. "The road and the river are one thing now. The town just isn't sure it's allowed to stop."

He mixed the black with a little linseed and laid the mark in the corner of the board before anything else, a dot and a comma stacked like a pair of eyes that had decided to wait. It is a strange thing to paint a pause that means keep going. Lorries came round the bend at fifty, the wind pushed grit across the lettering, and every morning Harlan drove out to see whether the mark had held.

On the last Saturday of the spring, the river came back for an afternoon, brown and furious, and it tore the old sign off its posts and carried it half a mile down the wash. Harlan found the new board snagged in the mesquite, face to the sky. The words were scoured off, but the little stacked mark was untouched, black as the day he laid it. He stood in the sand a long time, then drove back to the motel and told Mrs Okafor the board needed only a new post, because the part that counted had stayed where it was put.