Fresh colour tattoo of six semicolons arranged in a ring around a small dot on a forearm, while a gloved tattooist wipes the skin.

Six semicolons in a ring on a forearm

Forearm · Colour · Photo

The tattoo shows six semicolon shapes arranged in a circle around a small central dot, drawn with dark outlines and filled with orange and peach shading. The skin looks freshly tattooed and slightly reddened, with traces of ink and wipe marks visible around the design. A gloved hand holding a cloth fills the top of the frame, and the forearm sits across the lower half against a plain background.

Forearm Semicolon Circle Dot Ring

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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

The compositor's case at Hebden and Strand had forty-odd boxes for letters, and the semicolon lived in the one nearest the floor, where Ada had to crouch to reach it. Mr Hebden called it the dead letter drawer. Nobody set a semicolon by choice, he said, not in a notice that had to go to press by six. A full stop closed a thing. A comma let it breathe. The semicolon only said, hold on, there is more coming, and printers hated promises they could not keep to deadline.

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Ada set them anyway. In March a man came in with a folded page of verse about his brother's boat, and every line ended in a semicolon. She asked him why. He said he had not been able to finish a sentence since the winter, and each time he came close to the end he found another clause waiting behind it. She set his poem in eight-point Caslon, all six hundred of them, and found she could not pull the last one from the case without holding it a moment in her palm.

When the proofs came back, the foreman had circled one line in red. It read: 'Here, the boat goes on without me; I am not done.' Ada wiped the ink from her fingers onto her apron, set six semicolons in a ring on the back page around a single full stop, and sent the forme down to the press without asking anyone.

The paper rolled out that night, warm and smelling of linseed. Nobody noticed the ring on the back page. Only the man came by on Thursday, read it standing up, and folded it into his coat without a word, which, Ada decided, was the most honest pause she had ever printed.