Tattoo of two puzzle pieces on the top of a foot, one piece shaded to look cut out of the skin and the other filled with blue fish scales.

Puzzle pieces with fish scales on a foot

Other · Mixed · Photo

A close photograph of a foot with a tattoo of two interlocking puzzle pieces. One piece is shaded in greys and browns so it appears to sit above the skin, while the other is filled with teal and blue fish-scale pattern, as if the skin has been cut away to show it. The shading gives the pieces a raised, three-dimensional effect against a patterned metal floor.

Other Puzzle piece Fish scale Foot

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The die for the Harbour Lights puzzle had a nick in one corner, and for three weeks nobody at Pennick and Sons noticed the pieces coming off the press with a small bite out of them. I noticed because I checked the sample trays every Friday, the way my father had, with a magnifying glass he kept in his waistcoat pocket long after he stopped wearing waistcoats.

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The tray held a grey fishing boat tied up in a harbour, but the bitten pieces came out as something else entirely. Someone on the night shift had been running the old mermaid tin through the same press, and the spoiled cuts had ended up in the wrong bin. Each one carried a curve of teal and blue, a row of fish scales where the water should have been. I kept a dozen in my overall pocket and said nothing.

On the last Friday before dispatch I carried the spoiled pieces home in a biscuit tin, meaning to crush them for scrap, and found I could not do it. I sorted the grey boat pieces from the blue scales by feel alone, since the blue ones had a faint ridge where the old ink had sunk into the card. Then I laid the sea out on my kitchen table and fitted it against the boat until the join held.

I posted the order on Monday with a note tucked under the lid: one boat, one box of sea, no charge, and some pieces may have been cut from a different harbour. A month later a letter came from a woman in Hull. Her son had fitted the water under the boat and would not let anyone move it, and she wanted to know whether there was another box.