What is "pinprick"

Usage examples of "pinprick".

In an odd jarring switch, at first the lanky hairless alien was a doll less than a hand high carved from the darkest brown bitternut wood, then, abruptly, she was taller than most Ykx, and the pinprick was a portal three wings high.

Besides, to shoot a mere amateur in Chouannerie would be as absurd as to fire on a balloon when a pinprick would disinflate it.

The light was murky grey again, pinpricked by houselights and street lamps.

The circular band of images collected by one probe as it completed one orbit of the hypersphere amounted to less than a pinprick, and even when the orbit was swept 360 degrees around the star, the sphere it traced out was about as significant, proportionately, as one shot of one location on an ordinary globe.

Quite gently, he closed the small, telltale pinpricks and eased the man to the ground.

He swept his tongue over the pinpricks, caught her chin, and welded their mouths together.

I began to feel thousands of tiny pinpricks all over my body, but they hardly hurt.

I felt pinpricks all over my body, and I was sure the others felt it, too.

I could almost feel the pinpricks on my skin, and taste the dry ashen taste in my mouth.

My toes curled down into claws, and my spine arched back as millions of pinpricks raced up my body.

Imagine porous paper stretched tight under a silkscreen, healthy dollops of gold and saffron ink, smaller ones of chestnut, tiny, tiny pinpricks of some color paler than the winter sun, the sudden back-and-forth of the wedge, and while the wavy lines bleed into each other, the artist dips his fine brush in umber ink and paints on careful rosettes which spread like the ripples in a pond.

Almost immediately they crept out from behind the island they could see the lights on the mainland, two or three pinpricks from the watch fires on the walls of the fort, and lantern beams from the buildings outside the walls, spread out along the se afront The three vessels he had spotted from the saddle of the mountains were still anchored in the roads.

They look like ordinary human stem cells at a distance, but instead of nuclei they have primitive pinpricks of computronium, blobs of smart matter so small they're as dumb as an ancient Pentium, reading a control tape that is nevertheless better structured than anything Mother Nature evolved.

Mice skittered in the walls behind the open cupboard where the magi stored their ap-parati: an astrolabe packed in velvet in a rosewood case, an armillary sphere that showed the motions of the heavens, a celestial globe with the stars marked out as pinpricks of silvery paint.

And once, in that same afternoon light, pouring over the Hellespontus and making everything to the west somewhat washed out, darkened to pastel opacities, her eye caught the pinprick reds of the roses in the hedge, even though she was walking the seawall-and seeing the tapestry of foam on the black water to one side of her, and the roses and Odessa rising up to the other side, she stopped, stilled by something in the double vision, by a realization-or almost-the edge of an epiphany-she felt some vast truth pushing at her, just outside her-or inside her body, even, inside her skull but outside her thoughts, pushing at the dura that encased the brain-everything explained, everything come clear at last, for once.