Small black fine line tattoo of a cross with a semicolon beneath it on the inner wrist of a hand with black nail polish.

Small cross and semicolon on wrist

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A small, thin black tattoo of a cross sits on the inner wrist, with two dots arranged like a semicolon beneath the crossbar. The linework is single and clean with a light, slightly soft fill, and the ink is solid black with no colour. The hand is angled across the frame against a dark background with a blue denim lap at the bottom.

Fine line Forearm Cross Semicolon Dot

Find an artist for this

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 lock gates at Stoke Bruerne have swelled shut since the thaw, so it falls to you to walk the towpath with the windlass, because your uncle Ned never trusted anyone else with the paddles. He left you the narrowboat, a tin of Brasso, and a logbook where every mooring since 1971 is written in his square capitals. The last entry is in pencil and only half a line long: Moored below the bridge, wind from the north, and then nothing, not even a full stop.

Keep reading

On Saturday a hire boat drifts into your pound, a couple bickering over a map held upside down. The man's tiller has slipped its pin, and you show him the trick Ned taught you, a folded tea towel and a firm shove. The woman leans on the roof and asks what the logbook is for. You tell her it's a record of where you've been, and she asks what Ned meant by leaving his last sentence unfinished. You don't have an answer for her, so you say he was a compositor, and that compositors don't waste ink.

That evening you sit with the book on the cabin table and turn back through the years. Ned used semicolons where other people would stop. Once, over a warm pint in the Boat Inn, he told you a semicolon is a full stop that has decided to hang on for one more clause. Every page is full of them, Moored at Blisworth; wind from the west; lost a bucket to the weir; and you realise he never really stopped writing.

You pick up the pencil. Under his half line you write the date, the wind, the hire boat with its crooked tiller, and then, after a long pause with the lamp hissing, a single semicolon, leaving the page open for whatever comes tomorrow.