A small black semicolon tattoo in fine line style on the inside of a wrist, with a hand and nails visible above it.

Small semicolon tattoo on a wrist

Fine line · Hand · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of a hand with pale nails, showing a small solid black semicolon placed on the inside of the wrist near the base of the hand. The mark is simple and crisp, with no shading, and sits against light skin on a plain, softly lit background. The composition centres on the wrist with the fingers extending across the upper part of the frame.

Fine line Lettering Hand Semicolon Punctuation Dot

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

The proof came back from the printer with a semicolon where the author had wanted a full stop, and Ruth Ashdown spent most of a wet Thursday arguing with it. She had set type for the Harbour Press for thirty-one years, first in lead and then in the grey film machines that smelled of vinegar, and she knew a comma from a pinhead. This was a deliberate half-step, the author insisted, a sentence that refused to finish because the sea in it had not finished either. Ruth moved the mark a hair to the left, the way her father taught her to nudge a letter so it sat level in the galley.

Keep reading

The pamphlet was about the fishing boats that had gone out from Scarness and never come back, and the author, a retired schoolmaster named Desmond Pryce, wrote every name in full. He wanted each sentence to hold its breath before the next one began. Ruth understood that. She had watched her own mother hold a half-finished thought for years, a pause that never resolved into a full stop because the kettle was always about to boil.

When the run was finished she kept one spare sort in the drawer of her case, a small black pip of type that had never found its line. On the last afternoon before the press was sold, she pressed it into the soft wax of a bookmark and posted it to Desmond with no note. A week later a card came back, written in a careful hand: Thank you for leaving the sentence open.