Close view of a woman's hands with a small black semicolon on the inner wrist and a small semicolon on the inner forearm, beside a colourful Japanese style sleeve on her other arm.

Small semicolons and a colour forearm sleeve

Japanese · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A woman with her face cropped below the nose holds her hands together in front of a yellow background, showing a small black semicolon on the inner wrist and a tiny semicolon on the inner forearm. On her left forearm a larger colour sleeve includes a rainbow, a blue figure and stylised clouds, with bold black outlines and solid fills. The composition is tightly framed on the torso and hands, with the colour sleeve contrasting against the black and white tank top and the saturated background.

Japanese Fine line Forearm Hand Semicolon Sleeve Rainbow Cloud Figure Wrist

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Ruth Ackland had kept the log of the Margaret Jean for eleven seasons, and in all that time she had never ended a line on a bad day with a full stop. Her father called it fussy. The skipper called it wasteful of ink. She wrote the wind, the catch, the tide and the fuel, and when something was still unsaid she put a semicolon and carried on into the next clause, as if the day had not quite finished with her yet.

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The February gale came in off the Dogger just after dusk. It tore the wheelhouse door from its hinge, drowned the bilge pump, and took one of Danny Roper's boots over the rail, which he would joke about for a month. Ruth wrote by lamplight with her knees braced against the chart table. Her hand skidded across the page. She filled three columns before the sea began to lie down, and she did not stop to wonder whether anyone would read them.

Near four the cloud split open to the east like a wet sheet pulled apart, and a band of colour ran out beneath it. Red, then orange, then a green she had only ever seen in the glass of harbour bottles. Beside the wheel, the painted woman on the bow, Margaret herself, had lost most of her blue to salt, but in that light the paint seemed to come back to her for a moment, and her robe lifted as if a hand had reached for it.

Ruth looked at the page a long while. Then she wrote: all hands accounted for, boot lost, sea going down; and under it the time and the position, and the rainbow, which she did not think the skipper would believe. At the end she left the line open with a semicolon, because the morning was coming and there was more to say.