Close view of the back of a person's neck showing a small black semicolon tattoo in fine line style, placed just below the hairline.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Small semicolon tattoo on the back of the neck

Fine line · Neck · Black and grey · Photo

A small, solid black semicolon sits on the back of the neck, slightly off centre, with the dot above and the comma-shaped tail below. The lines are clean and even, and the ink is uniformly dark with no shading. The image is a close, straight-on view from behind, with hair tied up, stretched ear piercings visible at the sides, and a black collar and grey top in the lower part of the frame.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The dot went into the forme first. Halloran always set the top of a mark before its tail, saying it was the only honest order, and he made Ruth watch while he locked the small brass sort into the chase with the flat of his bone-handled stick. "A full stop would finish it," he said, tapping the dot with a fingernail. "A comma would only breathe. This one wants the reader to keep leaning in."

Keep reading

The job was the parish newsletter for Holbeck, a list of names for a memorial supper. One sentence in the copy ran from a widow's name straight into the name of a boy who had not come home from Ypres. Mrs Oakes had written it out in pencil at the counter, crossed out the full stop twice, and left the gap standing. Halloran said a printer does not argue with a gap. He set it exactly as she wrote it.

Ruth pulled the proof that Thursday. The semicolon sat small and black on the cheap grey paper, neither ending the thought nor letting it drop. Mrs Oakes came in for her copies and stood at the counter reading that one line with her gloves still on. She said nothing for a long while. Then she folded a sheet into her coat and went out without paying, and Halloran let her.

Years later, Ruth found a copy of that newsletter in a box of old parish papers. On the back, in pencil, Mrs Oakes had written the boy's name again, and beneath it, after a small space, a second line that began with the word still.

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