Close-up of a black and grey semicolon tattoo with soft ink-wash edges and splatter marks on the inner forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Semicolon with ink splash on a forearm

Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A semicolon is tattooed on pale skin, with the dot and the comma-shaped tail rendered as soft, blurred black shapes. Soft grey gradients and fine splatter marks give the piece a watercolour or ink-wash effect, with faint reddish tones around the edges. The tattoo sits near the centre of the frame against a dark background.

Forearm Semicolon Punctuation Ink splash

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit down, you, and mind the dust on the step; the road out past Calder Wells has taken better men than you. My grandmother told this one with the lamp turned low, and she always stopped at the same place, the way a rider stops at a well. Her hands would come together and hold there. That is the pause I mean. It is not an ending. It is the place where a thing goes on, though the speaker has had enough of talking for the moment.

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Years back there was a mail driver called Tobias Renn who ran the Calder route in a lorry with no working wipers. He carried letters for a widow named Ines Ahearn, who lived in the last house before the salt flats and wrote to her brother in Adelaide every fortnight without ever getting an answer. Renn never read the envelopes. He read the postmarks, and the postmarks told him she was still writing; that was reason enough to keep her road in his head.

One October the brother's reply finally came, a single sheet, and Renn drove it out through a dust storm that turned the afternoon the colour of weak tea. The house was shut up. Her lamp was still burning in the window, though, a thread of yellow in all that brown. He knocked, and nobody came, and he understood then that some sentences are only half spoken; they wait for the reader to stand up and finish them.

He left the letter under a stone on the step and drove on, and that is where my grandmother always stopped, hands together, lamp low. Whether he came back, I cannot say. Go on, now. Take the road slowly.