Watercolour-style jigsaw puzzle pieces in red, yellow and teal with the words Define and Normal in black script on a forearm.

Jigsaw pieces with Define Normal lettering

Lettering · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A forearm tattoo shows two jigsaw puzzle pieces at the centre, filled with red, yellow, teal and green watercolour-style washes that splash outwards. The words Define above and Normal in quotation marks below are inked in black script lettering. The photograph is taken outdoors on a street, with a person's jeans and teal shoes and a car key visible in the background.

Lettering Forearm Puzzle piece Watercolour splash Text

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mara carried the box up from the canal steps under her shawl, because the rain had come on hard and the lamps along Tanner Row were already guttering. Inside, wrapped in old newsprint, lay a hundred and forty cardboard pieces, each cut from a different picture. Her uncle, who kept the puzzle stall at the market, said the maker had sold them as one set and nobody had ever finished it.

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She spread them across the kitchen table at midnight. A red piece with a splash of paint along one edge fitted nothing. A yellow one matched a green one only after she turned it over, and a teal one wouldn't sit anywhere until she gave up on the picture on its face. The dye men at the works had a saying that colour bleeds where it wants to go, and she began to think the pieces were the same.

Her uncle came down in his coat at two in the morning, looked over her shoulder and laughed quietly. "You're asking what the picture should be," he said. "Ask instead which two pieces will hold." She found them quickly after that: two halves of a red-splashed sky, cut from a box she had never seen, and when she pressed them together they clicked and stayed, and the colour ran outward from the seam as if it had decided to be loud.

At dawn she sold nothing, but pinned the pair to the stall board with a card that read Define normal. A woman in a grey scarf read it, paid a penny and took the rest of the box home still unfinished. By noon the board held only its pins, and the puzzle had gone off to be built by someone who would fit it their own way.