Colour tattoo of four interlocking puzzle pieces in blue, yellow, green and red with black outlines, on the inner forearm near the wrist.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Four puzzle pieces tattoo on the forearm

Forearm · Colour · Photo

Four puzzle pieces in blue, yellow, green and red sit together, with black outlines around each piece. The gap in the middle forms a rounded, heart-like shape. The flat colour fills are solid and the design is shown in close, straight-on focus on pale skin.

Forearm Puzzle piece Heart

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The jigsaw had lived on the playroom shelf since October, its box corners worn soft, and nobody on days ever bothered to count the pieces. I counted them at four in the morning, sitting cross-legged on the ward floor with a mug of tea going cold beside my knee. Four pieces were left from the picture on the lid: blue, yellow, green and red. They fitted around a rounded gap in the middle, and no amount of turning would close it.

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Ada, six, was awake in bed nine with a threadbare rabbit tucked under her chin. She watched me over the cot rail for a while before she spoke. 'The hole in the middle is meant to be a heart,' she said. 'You leave it empty so the heart can get in.' I asked who had told her that. 'The picture on the box,' she said, as if I were being slow. I turned the box over, and there it was, printed small and faint, a heart sitting exactly where the gap was.

I laid the four pieces on the blanket beside her hand, not quite touching, and we looked at them together until the window started going grey. Nothing about the night had changed. The ward was still short-staffed, the bleep still went off at the station, and the blue piece still did not know where it belonged. But the gap had stopped looking like a mistake.

At seven the day staff came in with their coats and their questions. Ada was asleep, one yellow piece clutched in her fist. When the sister asked where the rest of the jigsaw had gone, I told her it was finished, which was not strictly true, but it was the sort of thing you could say at handover.