Small outlined colour tattoo of a blue puzzle piece with a green and gold ribbon looping across it, shown on skin.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Puzzle piece and ribbon tattoo

Colour · Photo

A small tattoo of a light blue puzzle piece with a green and gold ribbon crossing over it diagonally. Both shapes have black outlines and soft shading within the blue and green fills. The motif is centred against plain skin with no other elements in the frame.

Puzzle piece Ribbon

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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

Now then, sit closer, because the kettle won't wait. You'll have seen the jigsaw on the sideboard at Gull Rest, the one with the lighthouse and three hundred pieces of grey sea. Nobody finished it in my mother's time. Mrs Abernathy tried every winter for twelve years, and every winter she came down to breakfast with the same blue corner missing.

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The summer the boy came, he was nine and quiet as a mooring rope. He would not eat his egg until it was cut into the shape he wanted, and he would sit nowhere but the window seat facing the harbour. Mrs Abernathy's son had left her the puzzle box in his will, along with a green and gold ribbon he had tied round the newel post the morning he sailed. Nobody untied it. The boy never asked about the ribbon. He sorted the pieces by colour, every single one, and set the blue ones in a heap as if they were waiting for a ship.

On the last night of August the missing piece turned up. It had been stuck to the sole of a salesman's boot, and the salesman swore on his mother that he had never set foot near the sideboard. The boy took it from the carpet, turned it over twice, and fitted it into the gap with one flat tap of his thumb. Then he traced the ribbon the picture laid across the water, green where the lighthouse stood and gold where the sun broke through.

Mrs Abernathy came down in her dressing gown and found the jigsaw complete. She did not cry, which surprised everyone, herself most of all. She untied the ribbon from the newel post, looped it loosely round the boy's wrist, and said that some things come back to the shore when they are ready. Mind you, the salesman still says he never stepped near that sideboard.