Close-up of a hand with a small solid black semicolon tattoo on the side of a finger, shown in black ink on lightly tanned skin.

Small semicolon tattoo on a finger

Hand · Black and grey · Photo

A small solid black semicolon sits on the side of a finger on a hand that is curled in front of a blue and white patterned background. The mark has crisp edges and uniform black ink with no shading. The skin tone and pale pink nail polish are in soft natural light, and the tattoo is the only dark element in the frame.

Hand Semicolon Punctuation Finger

Find an artist for this

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

Dear Tom, the proofs for the Hebden novel came back this morning with the same question in the margin in Mr Gilling's pencil, and I have spent an hour at the window trying to answer it for him. He wants a full stop after 'the kettle had gone cold'. I have told him the sentence is not finished, only resting, and that the author set a semicolon there for a reason.

Keep reading

You are eighteen and you want everything to end cleanly. I understand that. When I was your age the foreman clipped me round the ear for leaving a comma where the men wanted a stop, and he said a line of type should earn every mark it carries. I have kept that with me, though I have also learned that a full stop is a door shut hard, while a semicolon is a hand kept on the latch.

So the sentence stays. The kettle stays cold, the lamp stays lit, and the two halves stand either side of the mark like a pair of neighbours who have agreed to speak again tomorrow. Set it small, the way the old fount wants, and keep the black even so it does not spread on the paper.

I enclose a proof with the mark circled in blue. Pin it above your bench. Some mornings the whole page is nothing but stops, and you will want to see one that held. Yours, Edna.