Small fine line semicolon tattoo in dark purple ink on the inner wrist, shown against a printed book page.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Semicolon tattoo on the inner wrist

Fine line · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A small semicolon is tattooed in dark purple ink on the inner wrist of a raised hand. The linework is thin and solid, with no shading, and the mark sits centrally on the wrist. The hand is photographed against a page of printed text in a warm, muted tone, which forms a soft background.

Fine line Forearm Semicolon Punctuation Wrist

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

It has been raining on the market since seven, and the tarpaulin over your stall has begun to sag in the middle, so every twenty minutes you lean out and tip the pooled water into the gutter. The paperbacks suffer for it. You have spent the morning shuffling them under the trestle and wiping spines on your sleeve, and nobody has bought anything except a bag of coins from a child who wanted the shiny ones.

Keep reading

The woman in the green anorak comes past for the third time just before noon. She stops this time. She is carrying a shoebox of Portuguese novels with swollen covers, and she asks if you know anyone who reads them. You say the university on the hill, probably, and she nods as though that was the answer she expected, then opens the top book at a page near the back. Someone has pencilled a small ring around a semicolon and written beside it, in careful capitals, NÃO PARES AQUI. Do not stop here.

She tells you the man who owned the books was a compositor in Porto who set type for forty years and never once let a sentence end before he was ready. His daughter says he would hold a semicolon up to the window like a jeweller checking a stone. When his hands started to shake, he stopped using full stops altogether, because a full stop, he said, was just a sentence giving up its breath. You are not sure you believe her. You are not sure it matters.

She takes a pound for the box and walks off into the grey, and you carry the books under the awning, drying each one page by page. Later, when the rain finally thins, you open the ledger and write the day's takings, and at the bottom, where you usually draw a line, you put a semicolon instead, and leave the sum hanging there, waiting for whatever comes next.