Close-up of a small solid black semicolon tattoo on pale skin at the wrist.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Semicolon tattoo on the wrist

Other · Black and grey · Photo

The image shows a semicolon tattoo in solid black ink, made up of a small dot above a larger comma-shaped mark. The edges are clean and the ink is fully saturated with little visible shading. It sits on smooth, pale skin against a plain background, with the composition tightly framed on the tattoo.

Other Semicolon Punctuation

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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

Brother Anselm had copied the same psalter for eleven years and knew its every stop. A full stop was a bone set into the page; a comma was a breath. So when the new abbot's letter arrived from Venice with its stranger mark, he held it to the window and squinted at the dot sitting high over the hooked tail, like a bird perched on a fence post.

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"It means the sentence continues," said Brother Oswin, who had been to Venice and therefore knew things. "Though what comes after is joined to what came before, and not yet finished."

Anselm did not like that. Nothing in the Rule was unfinished. He had spent the morning trying to write a line of the Office in the new way and found that his pen kept stopping halfway, unwilling to commit, the ink pooling in the gap between the two marks like a note held too long.

He took the letter to the chapel anyway, where the candles were low and the light came in grey through the east glass. He read the sentence aloud the old way, stopping hard at each dot and hook. Then he tried it the new way, pausing where the mark asked him to pause but not fully letting go. The sentence did not end. It leaned forward and waited for the next true thing to arrive.

He went back to his desk and, for the first time in eleven years, did not close the day's last line with a full stop. He left a small dot and a tail, and beneath them a band of blank parchment, which he decided could wait until morning to be told what it held.