Close-up of a small semicolon tattoo in soft watercolour blues, pinks and yellows on the chest, above a patterned fabric neckline.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Small watercolour semicolon on the chest

Fine line · Chest · Colour · Photo

A small semicolon tattoo sits on pale skin, with a round dot above a curved comma-shaped stroke. The linework is soft and the fills blend blue, pink, yellow and green in a watercolour-like wash. The tattoo is centred in the frame against a plain skin background, with a dark patterned fabric along the bottom edge.

Fine line Chest Semicolon

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The forme was already locked when Nessa noticed the full stop. Mr Pryce had handed her the copy for the colliery notice at six, pencilled in a hand that shook more each week, and it ended with the word closed and a hard black point that would sit on the page like a shut door. She sorted the type case by lamplight, the lead cold under her fingers, and found she could not make her hand reach for the period.

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Instead she reached for the semicolon, which lived in the wrong box beside the brackets, worn at the tail from forty years of other people's sentences. She set it after closed, then a space, then the rest of the line about the men being told on Monday and paid what was owed. The sentence went on. It promised nothing, but it did not stop either.

Pryce came in with his coat still on and read the proof twice. "That's not how the notice goes," he said. "It's a full stop, lass. The company wants it finished."

She had her answer ready, and it was not about grammar. "Nothing's finished till the men say so," she said. He looked at the forme for a long time, the way men look at a pit head before they go down.

On Monday the notice went up on the chapel wall with its open sentence, and the proofing ink on her fingers had dried the blue and pink of a bruise going soft at the edges. She wiped her hands on her apron, but a little colour stayed in the creases of her knuckles, and she let it.