Small black semicolon tattoo on the upper back of a person with their hair in a bun, photographed from behind beside a railway track.

Small semicolon tattoo on upper back

Back · Black and grey · Photo

The photograph shows the back of a person with light hair tied in a loose bun, standing beside a railway track with grass and trees behind. A small, solid black semicolon sits on the upper back, slightly below the base of the neck and towards the centre. The tattoo is a simple filled glyph with no shading, and the image is in natural daylight with muted colours.

Back Semicolon Hair bun Tree

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

Mr Ansell paid for his room a week at a time, in coins he counted onto the hall table, and every Thursday he came down to the breakfast room with a sheaf of foolscap and asked me to read a sentence aloud. I was seventeen that summer and helped my mother run the boarding house at Carrow Bay, where she said a girl with ink on her fingers would never marry. He was writing a history of the branch line that ran up the coast from the junction and stopped just short of our front gate, and he wanted to know whether a semicolon could hold up a sentence the way a sleeper holds up a rail.

Keep reading

I told him it could, if the two halves were of equal weight. He tapped the page with his pencil. "Equal, but not the same," he said, and I said that was the whole point of the mark: a pause where the train does not stop, only slows over the points before it runs on. He laughed and wrote it down in his square hand, and the next morning there was a half-crown under my cup.

On the Monday he left before the breakfast gong. The sheaf was gone from the table, but on the back of the bill he had tucked beneath the salt was a single pencilled line: I have put the mark where you said, and the chapter goes on. I kept that bill in my apron pocket all autumn. When the 4:10 came round the headland, I'd stand at the gate and listen to it take the points, slowing and not stopping, the way you would for a sentence you meant to finish.