Black fine line tattoo of a semicolon with a flock of birds rising from its top, on the ankle.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Semicolon with birds on an ankle

Fine line · Ankle · Black and grey · Photo

A solid black semicolon sits on the ankle, with a scattered flock of small birds rising from its upper dot and drifting up towards the front of the leg. The semicolon is filled in with solid black ink, while the birds are drawn with thin, delicate linework. The photograph is taken against a blue leather surface, with the skin shown in soft, even light.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Nell, the Marigold has been eleven days out of Valparaíso and the swell has not let up once, so forgive the hand. Mr Pym, the purser, caught me at the lamp this morning with my pen hovering over the ledger and asked what I was doing. I said I was deciding whether a sentence should end. He laughed the way he does and told me a sentence is only finished when the man writing it runs out of nerve.

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So I have been keeping a list. Every bird we pass gets a line in the back of the log: the gannets off the Horn, a pair of storm petrels that followed us for a whole watch, the grey albatross Jory swears was asleep on the mainmast. Most of them lift from the wake like someone shaking crumbs off a cloth, and then they are gone into the glare.

Here is the thing I most want you to know. Yesterday the second mate pointed out a flock rising off the water a mile to larboard, and I counted fourteen before the wind took them. I thought, that is a semicolon. A stop that does not stop anything. The sentence goes on, only in a new direction, with a little of its weight let go into the air.

I have drawn the mark in ink on the back page, dot and tail, and the birds climbing out of the top of it like smoke from a struck match. Keep my letters for me. I will tell you the rest when we make port and the words sit still.

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