Two photographs: a small purple semicolon tattoo behind an ear, and a black semicolon above the words I was a victim tattooed on skin.

Semicolon tattoos behind an ear and on an arm

Lettering · Other · Mixed · Photo

The top photo shows a small purple semicolon tattoo with solid, simple shapes sitting behind an ear, with some redness on the surrounding skin. The bottom photo shows a larger black semicolon above the words I was a victim in a plain, hand-lettered script on pale skin. Both images are close crops with even lighting and show only the tattoos and the nearby skin.

Lettering Other Forearm Semicolon Ear Text Script

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The foreman wanted the full stop. Everybody wanted the full stop by the Friday of a long week, when the paper had to go to press and the men in the back room had stopped listening to anything but the clock. I sat at the lamp bench with the galley proofs spread out like a wet tablecloth and told him the sentence was not finished.

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It was the obituary for old Harold Gedge, who had kept the light at Skerry Point for thirty-one years and then, for reasons nobody in Maddox Bay ever explained, had gone on keeping it after the lamp was switched off. The copy read: He watched the water every night; he never once looked away from it. Ned, the sub-editor, had marked a full stop after water and another after away, and wanted two short sentences where I wanted one long breath held together by a mark that was neither.

I took my pencil and drew it in the margin, a dot above a comma, small and exact, so the typesetter would have to hunt for the piece of lead that matched it. Ned laughed. A semicolon, he said, is what people use when they cannot make up their minds. I said it was what people use when they have not finished but need to breathe. He let it stand because the page was late and he had a daughter to collect from the school gates.

The paper went to press at six with the mark intact. Nobody wrote in about it. On the Monday, Harold's niece came into the office with a copy folded small in her coat pocket, and she ran her thumb under that one little pause the way you would touch a stone on a path you knew you would walk again. She didn't say anything. She didn't need to. The sentence simply carried on.