Small black semicolon tattoo on the inner wrist of a raised hand, with stacked books blurred in the background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Small semicolon tattoo on the wrist

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A raised hand with two fingers extended shows a small, neat black semicolon tattooed on the inner wrist. The linework is fine and solid with no visible shading, and the mark sits centrally above the wrist crease. The background is a soft-focus, pale grey-blue wall with stacks of books in muted browns, creams and greens.

Fine line Forearm Semicolon Punctuation Book Hand

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

On Skerrabost the sea took men in the winter and gave back nothing but their boots. The women kept the names in a ledger in the chapel, and each name was closed with a full stop, because that was how Morag's grandmother had been taught to finish a thing: a stop was a door shut on the room.

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Morag would not close them. When the boat Ailsa went down off the Stac, she wrote her husband's name, then the word for the tide, then the word for waiting, and between the first and the second she set a small mark, a comma with a dot beneath it. The minister said it was not a word, only a pause, and a pause was not a grief. She said a grief that was not finished did not need a full stop, and she went on writing.

Each spring after, a girl from the mainland came over to copy the ledger for the census and found every entry running on into the next, the names standing in a line like boats on a rope. She asked the old woman why. Morag showed her the mark and said it meant the sentence was not over, only the part of it you could see. Then she sent the girl down to the harbour to watch for the boats that were late.

The boats came in, most years, with the men still in them, and Morag wrote them into the book with no stop at all.