Black and grey neo-traditional tattoo of comedy and tragedy theatre masks facing each other with ribbon scrolls, on the side of a torso.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Comedy and tragedy masks with ribbons

Neo-trad · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

Two theatre masks face each other in profile, one smiling and one showing a tear, with their lips close together. Ribbon scrolls curl around both masks and the shading uses soft grey gradients with bold outlines. The image is a close photograph of the tattoo on bare skin, with the design filling most of the frame.

Neo-trad Ribs Ribbon Tear Kiss

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Maureen, Dennis had the masks out on the dressing-room table again when I came in, the comedy one propped against the tragedy one like two drunks sharing a bench, and I'd have swept them into the skip if he hadn't looked so pleased with himself. You'll remember the pair from the Pavilion. Old Hollis carved them in 1958 for a run of The Tidewater Wager, and when the pier shut for the winter they went into a fish box under the stage, where the damp got into the ribbons and the paint went soft at the edges.

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Dennis says the masks were never meant to face the audience at all. He found a note pinned inside the lid, in Hollis's cramped capitals: THEY KISS IN THE BLACKOUT, NOT THE LIGHT. So for the last scene, when the two lovers are parted by the tide, the stagehands used to hold the masks nose to nose in the dark while the bell rang, and nobody out front ever saw it. Only the prompter, which I was for six seasons, and I never once thought to ask why the tragedy mask was crying.

Last Thursday the bell failed and the house lights came up early. Dennis stood frozen in the wings with the masks in his hands and the whole front row staring at two faces pressed together under a painted tear. Nobody laughed. A woman in the third row started to cry herself, and I think that was when Dennis decided the masks had earned a proper shelf.

He's put them in the glass case by the box office now, lit from underneath. Yesterday a child pressed her nose to the glass and asked if they were sad or happy. Dennis said yes. I've told him that's a terrible answer and he's pleased with it.