Watercolour-style tattoo on the inner wrist showing a black semicolon, pink and purple strokes and blue ink splashes.

Watercolour semicolon and splashes on a wrist

Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A tattoo on the inner wrist shows two black semicolon shapes, one with a dot and one with a curved tail, set among soft pink, purple and blue brushstroke bands. Blue and purple splatters and blotches give a loose watercolour effect, with the edges fading into the skin. The design runs diagonally across the wrist and is shot against a plain, neutral background.

Forearm Semicolon Splash Brush stroke Ink splatter Watercolour

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dorothy had been painting the same banner for three weeks, and every night the damp got into the canvas and softened the letters she had laid down that morning. She kept her colours in jam jars on the tailboard of the caravan: rose madder, ultramarine, a bruise of violet she had bought from a chemist in Lincoln who never asked what it was for. Behind her the big top sagged over the field like a tired animal lying down, its red and white panels gone the colour of weak tea.

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Wilf came up the lane with a bundle of handbills under one arm and mud to his knees. "Paint us something that says we're pausing," he said. "The council man wants to see a sign before he signs anything." Dorothy dipped a sable brush and drew a dot, heavy and black, then a curled tail beneath it. "That's not a stop," she said. "It's a comma that's had a bad night."

"Then what is it?"

"It's what you put when the sentence isn't finished." She blotted the tail with her thumb. "A full stop would be a lie. Everyone knows that."

He did not laugh this time. He stood with the handbills going soft in his hand while she worked, loading the brush with pink and dragging long streaks across the canvas, then blue, then violet, until the lettering sat under them like something seen through a window. She flicked ultramarine from a height, the way the old lion tamer used to flick water at the children, and let it bloom where it fell.

The council man came on Thursday. He looked at the banner for a long time. Then he looked at the field, and at the children climbing the fence to see the elephants that were no longer there, and he asked Wilf who had painted it. Wilf said nobody in particular. Dorothy, watching from the caravan step, thought the rain had done most of the work, and that the two semicolons still sat where she had put them, holding the sentence open.