Tiny black semicolon tattoo on the inner wrist in fine line style, shown on a raised hand in front of a brick wall and metal mailboxes.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Small semicolon tattoo on the inner wrist

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A small semicolon is tattooed on the inner wrist, drawn in fine black linework with solid ink. The tattoo is placed near the centre of the wrist and sits alone against plain pale skin. The background shows metal mailboxes, a brick wall and a pavement, and a person in a maroon top is partly visible at the right edge.

Fine line Forearm Semicolon Punctuation Wrist

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The last week at Hollins and Crewe, the compositor's frame was still full of type. Edith Lowe worked the case with her left hand and kept the sorts in order by feel, the way her father had taught her before the war took him to the Somme and the works took her on in his place. Nobody else on the floor would touch the lead semicolons. They were the smallest pieces, and they worked loose in the box.

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Tommy Ashby, the new apprentice, came over with a galley proof that had a comma where a semicolon belonged. "Does it matter?" he asked. Edith pulled the stick toward her, slid the right sort out with one fingernail and set it in the line. "It tells the reader the next thing is still about the last thing," she said. "A full stop shuts the door on it. A comma just nods."

The boy didn't ask again, but he watched her pull the final proof of the obituary column that afternoon, a column she had set herself for years. She checked each semicolon twice, holding the sheet up to the window where the light came in grey through the soot. The notice was for a man who had kept the works' accounts for forty years. It read well. It went on past the point where you'd expect it to stop.

When the machines were sold on Friday, Edith took one lead semicolon from the case and put it in her coat pocket. Nobody asked her what it was for. She didn't know herself, only that the sentence she had been setting for thirty years still had a clause to come, and she was not ready to close it.