Black fine line tattoo of a marionette hanging from strings with a small bow, placed on the upper back below the shoulder blade.

Marionette on strings across the upper back

Fine line · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A solid black silhouette of a puppet or marionette dangles from several long, thin vertical strings that stretch up towards a small bow, with two short wavy lines beneath it. The linework is fine and the figure is filled in solid black, with no shading or colour. The tattoo sits off-centre on the upper back, and the image is cropped at the neck and waist.

Fine line Back String Bow Silhouette Ribbon

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The hall still smells of floor polish and cling-film sandwiches, and somebody has pinned the Year Nine programme to the noticeboard by the urn, so I am reading my own name in Comic Sans before I have found anyone to talk to. Gareth finds me first. He has gone grey at the sides in a way that suits him, and he holds out a squash as if we parted yesterday.

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"You still owe me a puppet," he says.

We were fourteen, and Mrs Okonedo gave the drama club a single marionette to share between the Tinderbox soldiers, a tin captain with a painted moustache and joints that clicked like knuckles. Gareth had the bar that worked the head, and I had the cross that worked the arms. On dress rehearsal night the strings tangled into a knot the size of a fist, and Denise Parry, who had lent us her hair bobble for the captain's sash, tied a bow on the cross-bar to make us laugh. It did. We laughed so hard the captain swung in the wings like a drunk man on a bus, and the whole audience heard it through the curtain.

Gareth says he kept the captain. When his mum moved house he found him wrapped in a school jumper in a box marked Rubbish, the bow still tied, and he has never once let the strings go slack. He fetches his phone and shows me a photograph of the figure hanging from a beam in a loft, lit by one bare bulb, its arms raised as if it were waiting for someone to call the next cue.