Close-up of a watercolour-style rainbow semicolon tattoo with black script reading my story isn't over, arcing above it on the skin.

Semicolon with rainbow wash and script quote

Lettering · Other · Mixed · Photo

A large black semicolon sits at the centre of a soft rainbow wash of pink, purple, blue, green, yellow and orange. Thin black cursive script arcs over and around the design, reading my story isn't over. The linework is clean and the colour fades softly at the edges, with the skin tone visible through the lighter areas.

Lettering Other Semicolon Rainbow Quote Script text

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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

Sit closer, the lamp is only good for one of us at a time. No, don't touch the drawer, the lead letters are older than my grandmother's grandmother and they bite. Now. You want the story of the mark with the two faces.

Keep reading

When the Ledger Council came down from the hills, they said every line of the record must end in a full stop. A full stop is a door shut, with nothing after it. So Hester Vane, who set type in the drowned town of Lowmere, took the pages of the dead to the press and did as she was told, all but one. Between the last two names on the list of the lost she set a semicolon, a dot above a little hooked tail, and she inked it in the colours the village had dyed its wool with before the flood. Pink from the madder, violet from the mussel shells, blue from the woad, green from the nettle, yellow from the weld, orange from the rust off the ferry chain.

The Council's clerk came with a magnifying glass and a rope. He found the mark and asked what it meant. Hester said it meant the sentence was still going, that a name is a pause and not a period, and the next breath belongs to somebody else. He did not understand her. Nobody did that spring. But he could not scrub the ink out, because the colours had sunk into the paper the way dye sinks into wool, and by the time he had scraped one corner the whole sheet was stained at the edges like a sunset.

Hester pinned the scrap over the door of the press, with her own words curling round the mark in black ink: my story isn't over. Her granddaughter copied them onto the wall of the schoolhouse, and that is where I learned my letters, under a rainbow smudge nobody was ever allowed to wipe off.