Small solid black semicolon tattoo behind a person's ear, with a metal stud piercing in the ear above it.

Small semicolon tattoo behind the ear

Other · Black and grey · Photo

A close-up of a small, solid black semicolon tattoo sitting on the skin behind the ear, with dark hair visible to the right. The mark has crisp edges and an even black fill, with no shading or colour. The tight crop places the tattoo centrally, with the ear and a metal stud piercing framing it on the left.

Other Semicolon Ear

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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 foreman, Ray Costigan, held the galley up to the bulb above the stone and tapped the line with a pencil. "It's a long sentence, Dot. Lose the stop in the middle and we get the whole paragraph on one measure." Dorothy Sowerby did not look up from her case. She had set type at the Calder Valley Courier for thirty-one years and knew every box by feel, the capitals in the top tray, the small italic sorts in their dusty pigeonholes.

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The semicolon in question was a battered sort, its nick worn where the shank had struck a thousand forms. She lifted it from the case and turned it between finger and thumb. It was the last one left in the house. Her father had cut the punch for it before the war, and he liked to say a semicolon was a comma that had been to university. "The sentence can stand on its own," she said, "but it hasn't finished its thought. Take the mark out and you tell the reader the bridge is down."

Ray grumbled, but he let her have the line. She justified it with thin spaces and a copper rule, pulled a proof on the old press, and read it twice with her lips moving. The reporter had written about the reservoir sluices, the men who opened them at dawn, and the water that kept running on past the village long after the men had gone home.

Next morning the paper lay on the counter of the Co-op with the stop exactly where she had set it, a small firm pause between two halves that refused to close. Dorothy bought three copies and folded none of them.