Close-up of a semicolon tattoo with a blue and purple watercolour wash and black ink splatter on an upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Semicolon with blue watercolour wash

Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A close-up photograph of a semicolon tattoo on bare skin, with two dark grey-black dots and a curved tail. Soft blue and violet washes spread behind and around the mark, with a few black speckles and a dark brushed stroke beneath it. The composition is centred on the tattoo, with the skin tone and a dark edge visible at the top right.

Upper arm Semicolon Watercolour Splatter Abstract

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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

Mr Tregear never once let a sentence stop where it wanted to. He would hold the proof sheet up to the window over the harbour at Padstow, squint through his spectacles, and tap the place where a full stop had crept in too early. 'Not finished,' he'd say. 'Give it a breath and let the next clause come along.' I thought it was an old man's fussiness until the winter the boats stopped going out.

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The endpapers were my job. Every book the press bound that year got a sheet of marbled blue wash at the front, thinned with gall and dropped from a brush the way the sea drops foam on the slipway. Mr Tregear would flick black specks across it with an old toothbrush, and I would pull a dark stroke under the corner where the signature went. He said a book needed a mark that promised it wasn't done yet.

The letter came in February from Lisbon, a single sheet in a hand I didn't know. It held two dots, one above the other, with a long curled tail beneath, and beside them in pencil was a note: 'You will want the tail. Don't let them tell you it's a comma.' I read it three times at the bench with the brush drying in my fingers.

I bound the letter into the back of the next book without a word to anyone, wash side down, and left the last page open. The ink took slowly on the gloss. When the frost went off the slipway I wrote back, and I did not put a full stop at the end of it.