Small black fine line semicolon tattoo on the inner wrist, shown against a window with white blinds.

Small semicolon on the inner wrist

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A small, solid black semicolon sits on the inner wrist, just to the side of the centre line. The dot and comma are crisp, simple shapes with even, dense ink and no shading. The pale skin, the hand at the top of the frame and the blurred window blinds in the background make up the rest of the composition.

Fine line Forearm Semicolon

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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 Oddie wanted the lamp-room notice pinned up before the four o'clock shift, and he wanted it short. "Full stops, Nell," he said, leaning over my typewriter with his pipe gone out. "Men don't read commas down a pit."

Keep reading

I had typed the rules the way Mrs Barraclough taught us at chapel school, with a pause held between each duty and the one that followed from it. Trim the wick; report to the banksman. Check the gauze; sign the book. Oddie ran his thumb down the sheet and pressed each mark flat with his nail until the paper dimpled. Then he took the carbon for the office file and left the original under my hand.

That night, under the gas mantle in our back kitchen, I put the semicolons back. I did it one at a time, and at the last line I stopped with the pen lifted, because that line could not end without a second thought from the man reading it. A dot above a tail. Two things that belonged together, kept from falling apart by something small and stubborn.

In the morning the notice went up on the lamp-room door in Oddie's version, every line stopped dead. Nobody at the pit questioned it. But I still have my copy, folded in four in the pocket of my good coat, and on the last line, the one about the rope, two small marks still sit side by side, holding the thing together the way Mrs Barraclough meant them to.