Pencil drawing of a comedy and a tragedy theatre mask with swirling scrolls and dots over a diamond lattice background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Comedy and tragedy masks pencil design

Black and grey · Flash

The drawing shows two theatre masks side by side, one with a downturned mouth and one smiling, each with almond-shaped eyes. Fine pencil linework and soft grey shading define the masks, with curling scrolls, dots and ribbon-like swirls around them. A faint diamond lattice sits behind the masks, framing the composition on a plain white background.

Mask Swirl Scroll Dot Ribbon

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The props cupboard under the stage at the Corn Exchange smelled of size-six greasepaint and mothballs, and Margaret had the key on a shoelace round her neck because the caretaker had lost his twice. On Thursday she found the two masks in a biscuit tin behind the cobweb of old Christmas tinsel: one tragedy, one comedy, both made of papier-mache and painted by a sixth-form art group in 1978. The comedy mask had a chip off its left cheek. The tragedy mask still had its ribbon, faded to the colour of weak tea.

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She rang Desmond, who had played Hamlet's ghost and never once been asked to act a ghost again. He said the masks had been his idea, that he had carried the tragedy one all through the summer tour of Arsenic and Old Lace and had never been allowed to keep it. She said he had dropped it in the Dales and it had been her job to glue it back together. They argued for ten minutes about who had been right about the glue, and then neither of them could remember what they had been arguing about.

The reunion was at the Red Lion on the last Saturday of the month. Desmond came in a tweed coat that was too big for him and carried the tragedy mask under his arm like a hymn book. Margaret handed him the comedy one across the table. Neither of them put theirs on. They simply held them up, one each, and the room went quiet for the length of a breath before somebody at the bar laughed, and then everybody did, and the two old masks looked from one face to the other as if they were trying to decide which of them had won.