Printed sheet showing three black semicolon tattoo designs labelled The Semicolon, The Semicolon Trinity and The Semicolon Sol Invictus, with explanatory text beside each.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Semicolon tattoo project design sheet

Black and grey · Flash

A printed handout titled The Semicolon Tattoo Project presents three black line designs, each built around a semicolon mark. The first shows a single semicolon, the second a semicolon with three small curved marks arranged around it, and the third a radial arrangement of semicolons around a central dot, with accompanying paragraphs about each design. The artwork is solid black on a cream page, with no shading or colour.

Semicolon Sun

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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

The snow has closed the road to Hebden twice since noon, and Mrs Ashdown has stopped pretending the proofs will reach the printers by Monday. You sit by the back-room fire with the typescript of a dead almanac-maker on your knees, its margins crowded with blue pencil that is not yours. Nearly every sentence ends in a semicolon, which he seems to have used the way other men use a hand on a shoulder: to keep a thought company without letting it leave.

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By the third chapter you have stopped correcting them. You read them aloud under your breath instead, and the fire ticks along behind each one like a clock that has agreed to wait. A sentence that could have ended and did not, he wrote in the margin of page forty-one, and beneath it sketched a sun with curled rays, each ray a comma's tail turned back on itself. You trace it with your thumb. The paper has gone soft as cloth.

Near midnight the door bangs and Mrs Ashdown's nephew stamps in with a lantern and a sack of coal, white to the eyebrows. He asks what you are doing up. You tell him you are deciding whether the sun on page forty-one is rising or setting. He laughs and says the printers always got that wrong, and that his uncle once threatened to set the whole almanac in red just to spite them.

When he has gone up, you pick up the pencil. You do not add a full stop. You leave the last line open, a small hesitation at the end of the page, and go to bed with the sun still unfinished above the words.