Black semicolon tattoo on an arm with the words 'My story isn't over yet' in black serif lettering, the word 'isn't' picked out in red.

Semicolon with 'My story isn't over yet' on an arm

Lettering · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

A bold black semicolon sits above and below a single line of serif text reading 'My story isn't over yet', with the word 'isn't' in red. The semicolon has soft, blurred edges and the lettering is crisp, with the text running horizontally across the centre of the arm. Black ink dominates the composition, and the small red word is the only colour accent against the skin.

Lettering Upper arm Semicolon Text Quote Slogan

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mr Abernethy never let anyone else set the full stop at the foot of a page. He said it was the only mark that meant the thing was finished, and a printer ought to feel the weight of it. So when I came to the shop in Thornbury that autumn, sixteen and smelling of my mother's soap, I was given the cases of lowercase and told to mind my spacing.

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The job that winter was a memorial sheet for the Pryce boy, drowned at the weir. The copy came in a shaky hand and the family wanted it set by Saturday. Near the bottom, in the widow's own writing, a line ran on and on and then stopped at a semicolon, as if she had lifted her pen to breathe and meant to go on. I set it exactly as she wrote it. Abernethy read the proof with his spectacles down his nose and tapped the mark with a thick finger.

"Leave that," he said. "She isn't finished. Don't you dare full-stop a woman who's only pausing."

I still have the proof. Abernethy let me keep it, and I set the words in red only on the one small word where he said the feeling sat hardest, the isn't that refuses to let a sentence close.