Close-up of a small, solid black semicolon tattoo on the inner wrist, with a dark background behind the arm.

Small semicolon on the wrist

Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A small semicolon, made of a solid black dot above a black comma-shaped mark, sits on the inner wrist. The ink is dense and smooth with no visible shading, and the lines are crisp against the skin. The photograph is taken close up with a shallow focus and a dark background, so the tattoo is the clear focal point.

Forearm Semicolon Punctuation Wrist Minimal

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The snow had closed the pass on the third day, and by the fourth Marta Quine had counted the candles twice and the guests once. There were six of them, sheltering at the Hollin Inn with a wet dog and a fiddle nobody played. Marta kept the fire going and the ledger open on the bar, because her father had always said a house that writes down what it owes will never be cheated.

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On the fifth morning a carter came in stamping, carrying a letter he had been paid to deliver to the widow at the far end of the valley. He could not reach her. The letter had been sealed with wax, and when Marta turned it over she found the same sentence written twice on the back, once in ink and once scratched with a nail: he is not gone, he is only waiting for the road.

Marta read the letter aloud to nobody and then to the carter, who said nothing for a long while. Between the two halves of the sentence, someone had set a dot above a curved stroke, the way a schoolmaster marks a pause that is not a full stop. "That's a stop that isn't an end," said the carter. "My mother used to say the hill folk wrote them so a body knew the thought was still going."

On the sixth day the thaw came, and Marta walked the letter up the valley herself. She found the widow at her gate with a shovel, and when she handed it over the old woman read the mark and laughed and went back to her digging. The snow was still on the ground, but the road showed under it now, dark and running.