Black ink drawing on paper of two semicolons with the hand-lettered words OUR STORIES and WILL NEVER END, shown as a tattoo design with no body placement visible.

Semicolon with hand-lettered quote design

Lettering · Black and grey · Flash

A pen or ink drawing on pale paper shows two semicolons, one above the words OUR STORIES and one beside the words WILL NEVER END. The lettering is hand-drawn in uneven capitals with slightly rough edges, and the semicolons are filled dots with a tapered comma. The image is entirely black ink on off-white paper, with a plain, flat composition and no body or skin visible.

Lettering Semicolon Quote Lettering Text Dot

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Brother Anselm had been copying the same psalter for eleven years when the abbot came down to the scriptorium with a complaint. The bishop's clerk had read the last quire aloud and stumbled, he said, at every mark that was neither a full stop nor a comma, and the new book must be plain. Anselm dipped his pen and said nothing. The cold was coming off the fen through the shutters, and the ink in his horn had already thickened.

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That night he worked by one candle on the final leaf, the one that would close the book, and found his hand would not make a full stop. He tried three times. Each time the dot sat too heavy, too final, like a door shut on a room where someone was still talking. So he set a dot, then a tail beneath it, curled the way his mother had curled her g's on the back of a feast-day letter, and sat back to look at it.

In the morning the abbot found the mark and frowned, then read the line beneath it, which Anselm had lettered in the uneven capitals he used for the names of saints: OUR STORIES WILL NEVER END. The abbot's lips moved over the words twice. He did not reach for his knife. Instead he asked how long it had taken Anselm to learn to write a thing that did not finish.

Anselm told him the truth, which was that he had not learned it yet, and that he would go on trying every morning until the candles failed. The abbot left the leaf where it lay. When the bishop's clerk came at Michaelmas, he read the last line with a breath before it, and the whole chapter house waited for an ending that never came.