Close photo of a small, solid black semicolon tattoo on the inside of a wrist, in fine line style, with the hand raised above it.

Small semicolon on a wrist

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A small black semicolon sits on the inner wrist, shown from the palm side with the hand raised at the top of the frame. The mark is a neat, solid fill with crisp edges and no shading. The skin is pale against a light turquoise padded surface, with a dark background at the upper left.

Fine line Forearm Semicolon Punctuation Symbol

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The old woman at the edge of Fennel Wood kept a tin box of marks. The village children brought her their troubles on scraps of paper, and she gave each one back a small black sign. A full stop was for what was over. A comma was for a breath taken on the way up a hill. The sign she gave out least was the semicolon, two marks set one above the other like a stone dropped on a path, meaning that the thing was not finished but had reached a place where it must rest before it went on.

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Hester Gillow came out of the trees one March with a letter folded in her coat. Her father had gone to sea and not come back, and the letter had arrived with a line at its foot that read only: and so the boat was lost. She had written an answer to it, a long one, and she had ended it with a full stop after the word gone. She laid the page on the old woman's table and asked whether it was true that she had closed the matter.

The woman took up her pen, dipped it, and set a semicolon after gone. Then she wrote beneath it, in her thin hand: the kettle is still on the hob, and the bread is still rising, and the road to the mill is still there for the walking. "A full stop shuts a door," she said. "A semicolon only moves you into the next room. You may stay in it as long as you need."

Hester walked home through the wood as the light went, and the letter sat in her coat a little lighter than before. The village still says the old woman kept the box shut after that, and the tin lid never rattled again, though nobody ever saw her throw away a single mark.