Small black semicolon tattoo on the side of a finger in fine line style, with a pale pink nail and a blue patterned fabric behind the hand.

Small semicolon tattoo on a finger

Fine line · Hand · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of a hand with the fingers curled, showing a small solid black semicolon on the side of one finger. The mark has clean, simple linework with no shading, and the ink is crisp against the skin. The warm skin tones contrast with the pale blue and white patterned fabric in the background.

Fine line Hand Semicolon Punctuation Finger

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nobody at the Lantern Ballroom knew where the semicolon came from until Dolores Pike started using it on the dance cards. She ran the cloakroom that winter, and the cards were hers to fill, one pencil tick per partner, each tucked into a glove. Most girls wanted a full card by the second waltz. Dolores handed hers out half empty and marked the gap with a semicolon, a dot and a comma stacked like a held breath.

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Walter from the bandstand asked her about it over a bottle of lemonade. 'That's not a full stop,' he said. 'No,' she said. 'It's the bit where you wait to see if the sentence goes on.' He had a trumpet case with a crack down the side and a wife in Ramsgate who would not set foot in a dance hall. He asked her to save him the last waltz, and she wrote his name beside the mark, small, with the stub of pencil she kept behind her ear.

The band struck up 'Moonlight Serenade' at a quarter to eleven and the floor filled. Dolores counted the cards back in one by one and found his still there, the dot and the comma and the name written under them in her own hand. She had never once put a name after a semicolon.

Ramsgate took him in October. She kept his card in her coat pocket through the winter, and in the spring she tore off the corner and wrote one line beneath the mark: go on, then. It was the only sentence she ever finished on a dance card.