Close-up photograph of a small solid black semicolon tattoo on the inner wrist, with pale skin around it.

Solid black semicolon on a wrist

Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A small semicolon is filled solid with black ink on the inner wrist, with a dot above a comma-shaped mark. The edges are crisp and the fill is even, with no shading or added detail. The tattoo sits near the centre of the frame against plain pale skin and a dark background on the right.

Forearm Semicolon Punctuation

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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 Ledger wanted the semicolon out of the Whitsun handbill before it went to press. Nobody reads them, he said, and the small fount was running short. I told him a sentence can manage without a comma, but a semicolon makes the next clause wait for its name to be called, and he said I was talking like a Methodist. He left the decision to me, which was a mistake on his part, because in thirty-one years I have never made a decision quickly.

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So I went down to the cellar where the old cases were kept, and under a tray of worn sorts I found a semicolon cast from a matrix nobody had touched since the war. Its dot had gone soft at the edges, the way a thumbprint goes on a bus ticket. I held it up to the bulb and thought about the woman who had sent the copy, a Mrs Abney from Bolsover, who had written in her careful hand that the church hall needed two things: a new urn for the tea, and a second chance for the choir.

I set the line by hand. The dot went in first, then the tail, and the piece of metal sat in the stick as though it had been waiting for the job. When the proof came off the bed, the semicolon stood between the urn and the choir, small and black and entirely unimpressed with itself, holding two halves of an idea together so that neither had to stand alone.

Ledger read the proof and grunted. Then he tapped the place with a nicotine finger and said, "That one's a bit fat." I told him it was the only mark on the sheet that knew where it was going. He let it run.