Solid black semicolon tattoo on the inside of the wrist, surrounded by purple, blue and green watercolour-style splashes.

Semicolon with watercolour splashes on a wrist

Other · Mixed · Photo

The tattoo shows a solid black semicolon with loose splashes of purple, blue and green around and behind it. The black form is crisp and flat with no visible shading, while the coloured splashes have soft, painterly edges. The design sits centrally on the inner wrist against plain skin, with a dark, blurred background.

Other Semicolon Splash Watercolour Paint splatter

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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

Mr Aske came down to breakfast every morning with ink on his cuffs, purple at the wrist and blue where he had leaned on the frame, and every morning I told him the eggs would not wait. He was a compositor. He set the parish news by hand at the back of the print shop on Chapel Street, one lead letter at a time, and he said a lodging house by the sea was the only place a man could hear himself think over the gulls.

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In October he left a sort in the butter dish. I found it when I cleared the table: a little metal semicolon, black as a beetle, with a smear of green ink still wet on its tail. I asked him what it meant. He said it meant the sentence was not finished but the writer had decided to breathe. Then he laughed at himself and said that was the sort of thing a man says when he has been alone in a print shop too long.

The next morning the tide came in grey and went out silver, and the newspaper on the hall table had a line missing from the church notices. In its place was a blot of blue and violet, spreading the way the sea spreads over sand, with the mark sitting in the middle like a bird on a wave. Mr Aske had gone. His room was cold, the window open, the tray of type stacked neatly beside the bed.

I kept the paper. I have never printed a correction, and I have never once put a full stop where he would have put a pause.