There are many different tattoos. Some are meant to symbolize something — a difficult time in a person’s life or his love for family and friends — others are purely meant as “decorations of the body.”
Recently, a new tattoo has become popular: a tattoo of a semicolon that people put on their wrists.
This phenomenon started when Amy Bluel lost her father. He committed suicide after years of battling a serious depression. After his death, Amy decided that more attention should be paid to people who are struggling with depression and who have suicidal tendencies. Although it’s a very negative subject, she wanted to do it in a positive manner.
That’s why she came up with a semicolon tattoo.
Later, she asked other people to do the same. The goal of the project was to raise awareness for depression — which is a serious psychological issue many people suffer from — and to help depressed people by making them understand that they’re not alone.
The tattoo symbolizes a beautiful, hopeful thought: a semicolon is used because it means that the author wants the sentence to continue. Of course, the author symbolizes the person himself (or herself), while the “sentence” represents his or her life. Where there is life, there’s hope.
In the years since (Amy’s father took his own life in 2013, after which she founded Project Semicolon), an increasing number of people have put the tattoos on their wrists, thereby announcing they understand what it’s like to suffer from depression… while at the same time making clear that there’s still hope — for themselves and their loved ones.
It’s amazingly beautiful and I hope that many more people will follow in Amy’s footsteps. Although I’m actually not into tattoos myself, I’m seriously considering getting this one (we all have family members, relatives, or friends who have had to struggle with depression, or perhaps we even suffer from it ourselves).
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