Small solid black semicolon tattoo on the side of a finger, with pale pink nail polish and a blue patterned background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Small semicolon tattoo on a finger

Fine line · Hand · Black and grey · Photo

The photograph shows a small, solid black semicolon tattooed on the side of a finger, with a second finger curled across the frame. The mark has crisp, even edges and no shading, and sits in the middle of the frame against the skin tone. The background is a blue and white patterned fabric, and the nails are painted pale pink.

Fine line Hand Semicolon Punctuation

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mistress Ide Varrow would not let the ferry leave Sallow Landing until the children had read the last line of the Book of Pauses. The line ended in a dot set above a short hook, and nobody on the boat could say what it was for. Tobin, who was nine and had been sick twice already, said it looked like a sentence that had been told to wait.

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The old folk called the mark the stop-that-isn't. They said it was used in the years before the drowning, when a thing was not finished but needed a rest. A father would write it after a child's name while the child was away at sea. A mother would write it after a promise. Ide had kept the book wrapped in oilcloth for forty winters and turned its pages only with gloves, because, she said, the ink still remembered the hands that wrote it.

When the wind dropped, Ide read them the sentence on the open page: 'the boats went out; the boats are still out.' Tobin asked whether they would come back. Ide closed the book and said the mark did not answer that question. It only promised that someone would keep asking it. She pressed the bundle into his arms and told him to carry it to the far shore, where the lamp-keepers waited, and to tell them the sentence was not yet done.

Tobin stepped onto the wet stones with the book against his chest. Behind him the ferry turned back into the fog, and on the far shore a single lamp was already lit, which was how the old folk knew a thing was still being carried.