Two matching black outline puzzle piece tattoos in a fine line style, one on each bare foot near the arch.

Matching puzzle piece outlines on two feet

Fine line · Other · Black and grey · Photo

Two bare feet are shown from above, each with a small puzzle piece drawn as a single black outline. The linework is thin and even, with no shading or fill. The skin is pale and the ink is black, set against a beige carpet, and the two pieces are placed symmetrically so they would fit together as a pair.

Fine line Other Puzzle piece Outline Pair

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The big top had three patches on its canvas by the October the Halloran Brothers' Travelling Show ran out of money in Stoke, and Mags Petrie cut the puzzle pieces from the spare board she used for the sideshow banners. Nobody had asked her to. She sat on an upturned crate behind the wagons with the sheet across her knees, drawing with a ruler and a stub of pencil, the way you'd sketch a tooth you'd lost.

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Each piece had knobs and hollows that only fitted its partner. Mags said a show was like that. The strongman needed the girl who caught him, the clown needed a straight man, and when one half went, the other stood in the sawdust with nothing to do. She inked the outlines from the printing cart, thin and black, and left the middle empty. "Empty's honest," she said. "Let folk fill it in themselves."

We had four weeks of dates left. Tomasz worked the high wire and I held the ground rope, and we argued over who should carry which piece to the lodgings in Derby. I said he should, since he was always the one who kept things. He said I had the better eye for a fit. In the end we each carried ours in a tin, so nobody could mislay it in a packing crate.

The last night at Rugeley the tent came down in the rain, and Mags folded my piece into her coat pocket for safekeeping. Tomasz kept his. Years later, in a back room in Leeds with the radiator ticking, he finally brought his over and laid it against mine. The notches met with a click I felt in my teeth, and the empty space between them looked exactly the right size.