Close-up of a small, thin black fine line tattoo of a cross beside a semicolon on the inner wrist, with the palm visible above.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Small cross and semicolon on the wrist

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A small black tattoo of a cross followed by a semicolon sits on the inside of a wrist, photographed from the palm side with the hand at the top of the frame. The linework is thin and crisp with solid black ink and no shading. The plain beige skin and carpeted floor keep the focus on the small motif in the centre.

Fine line Forearm Cross Semicolon Punctuation Wrist

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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 type cases at Hollis's print shop had stood in the same order since before the strike, and Mr Hollis still made me say the names of the sorts back to him each morning before I touched the stick. I was fourteen when I started, standing at the frame with the window at my back so the light fell on the lead and not my hands. Every letter sits backwards in the stick, he told me, so you read the world in reverse until you are good enough to stop noticing. Nobody in Ferndale will thank you for a wrong letter, but they will remember it for thirty years.

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That October the chapel ordered two hundred service sheets for the Harvest walk, and the cross ornament for the masthead had gone missing from the drawer. Mr Hollis searched the case twice, swore at the cat, then tipped out the leftovers from the bottom tray. Among the broken rules and spacers sat a single semicolon nobody had wanted since the war. He turned it over under the lamp and said, 'Put that after the cross. Let them read the pause.' So I set it by hand, one small upright beside one small dot, and locked the forme with the quoins tight enough to hold the whole morning.

The sheets ran off warm and smelling of ink. On the Sunday, old Tom Pryce came into the shop with his cap in his hands to collect his order, and he stopped by the stack and ran his thumb along the bottom of the front page. He didn't ask what it meant. He just folded one sheet into his coat, nodded at me, and said a semicolon is the sentence that agrees to go on, which is more than most of us manage on a Monday morning.