Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Semicolon tattoo on the inner wrist

Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A small, solid black semicolon sits on the inner wrist, with the bottom dot and comma tail filled in. The mark is a simple, bold shape with clean edges and no shading or added detail. The ink is black on pale skin, and the photo is a close crop against a plain background.

Forearm Semicolon Punctuation Symbol

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Ada,

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You will laugh, but the whole works has been arguing about one mark for three days. Mr Haigh cleared it out of the case years ago, said nobody has used a semicolon since the war, and the young ones on the Linotype would not know one from a fly speck. Then Mrs Lacey sent us her memoir, four hundred pages from a schoolmaster's widow who writes as if she is talking across a kitchen table, and on page ninety she has put a semicolon in nearly every paragraph. Mr Haigh went white and sent me down to the back drawer to find one.

I found it under a tray of old quads, a little lead piece gone dull, with its dot sat above the comma as neat as a full stop that had changed its mind. I set it by hand and I cannot tell you how pleased I was. It is a stop that says the sentence is not finished, only resting, the way a man rests between dances at the Lyceum with his hand still at your back.

Last night, after the dance, I walked home with Frank along the canal and he asked me, plain as anything, whether I would stay at the works or come to the mill with him in the spring. I did not answer. I said something about the damp. But this morning I set the last page of Mrs Lacey's book, and the final line ends on a semicolon, so I thought, well, Nell, there's your answer, and I left the little black stop in the forme exactly as it was.

Love, Nell