Colourful watercolour-style tattoo of a semicolon with green, blue, orange and purple streaks on the wrist.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Semicolon with watercolour splash on wrist

Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A small semicolon, drawn in solid black, sits on the wrist with loose splashes and streaks of green, blue, orange and purple radiating outwards. The colour washes are soft and feathered, with the streaks fading towards the edges, while the black mark has crisp, defined edges. The composition is a close-up of the wrist against a plain skin background.

Forearm Semicolon Splash Watercolour

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The 19:42 to Harrowgate is held at Thornmere for a fault nobody can name, so you stand on the wet bench with the lamp unlit and watch the platform lights smear green and orange across the puddles. Somewhere behind the waiting room a dog barks at nothing. You have been relief signalman here for eleven days, and you still count the sleepers out of habit.

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Ferris, who kept this box for thirty-one years, left a biscuit tin in the lamp room with a note tucked under the lid: For when the board gets too full. The departure board is the old split-flap kind, and it still prints a semicolon after every junction name, because Ferris said a train is a clause that wants to carry on, not a full stop. Inside the tin are four dried paints, a cracked brush and a bottle of black ink the colour of the signal box at midnight.

You take the brush out onto the empty platform and flick it across the glass of the shelter. Green from the signal light, blue from the drizzle, orange from the lamp, and a purple like the sky before it gives up. The streaks fan outwards and thin at their edges, the way sparks run off a wheel on wet rail. Then you dip the pen and press one black mark at the centre, neat and sure, and step back to look at it.

The horn sounds down the line. The lamp flares, the doors chime, and the 19:42 pulls away with its lit windows sliding past the shelter. You watch the mark until the last carriage is gone. It isn't the end of anything. It is only the place where you take a breath before the next word.