Close photo of a small solid black semicolon tattoo on the inner forearm, with a patterned wall in the background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Semicolon tattoo on inner forearm

Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A small semicolon tattoo sits on the inner forearm, made of a solid black square dot above a wedge-shaped comma. The shapes are filled with flat black ink, with crisp edges and no shading or fine detail. The photo is taken close up against a black and white geometric patterned background, with a small healing mark below the design.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The case of sorts at Hollins and Sons had been arranged the same way since 1921, and Mr Tebbutt would not allow anybody to touch the semicolons except him. They were the fiddliest pieces in the box, a dot balanced over a little wedge of lead, and they snapped if you pressed them into the stick too hard. My job that winter was to sweep the floor and sort the broken bits back into their compartments, so I learned the shapes by feel before I learned to read a proof.

Keep reading

The night the boiler went, Tebbutt sent me back for a forme of the parish notices and I found him at the imposing stone with his spectacles pushed up, holding a single semicolon to the gaslight. 'It stops a sentence without ending it,' he said. 'Your mother used to write them to me like that, one after another, when she was cross and didn't want to say so.' I had never heard him mention my mother. He set the piece into the line with two careful taps and wiped his fingers on his apron.

We worked until the press was cold. Pulling the last proof, I saw the semicolon had printed a shade heavier than the rest, a black square over a tail, and I wondered whether a sentence could carry a grudge into print.

Tebbutt died in the spring. I kept the case, and when a customer brings me a notice that runs on past its stop, I leave the mark where it is and let the reader's breath hang on it a moment longer before the next thought begins.

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