Two side-by-side photos of a teal puzzle piece tattoo with fine black script, one reading like mother and the other reading like daughter, on skin.

Teal puzzle piece with 'like mother' script

Lettering · Other · Mixed · Photo

Two close photographs show matching tattoos, each with a solid light teal puzzle piece shaded with a darker teal edge. Thin black handwritten script sits beneath each piece, reading like mother on the left and like daughter on the right. The palette is limited to teal and black on pale skin, with the lines and shading clearly visible.

Lettering Other Puzzle piece Script Lettering Mother

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The night sister on Ward Six kept a biscuit tin under the drugs trolley. Inside were wooden puzzle pieces she had sawn from offcuts at a joiner's yard in Hebden Bridge, each painted the same pale teal as the corridor walls. Nobody on nights asked what they were for. When a child came in frightened after a fall at the mill, Agnes Feeney tipped the tin onto the blanket and said, find the one that fits your hand.

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In February a girl called Nell sat up in bed nine refusing every piece. Her mother, Ruth, lay behind the curtain with a drip in her arm. Years before, Ruth had been left on the back step of this same hospital as a baby, wrapped in a blanket with a single painted piece tucked inside it. Agnes had found it there. She sat on the edge of the chair, knees cracking like kindling, and fished out a plain piece from the bottom of the tin. It had a blunt knob where a tab should be.

"That one was in your mother's blanket," she said. "I've kept its other half since the night she came in. Every piece has a mate, but somebody has to be patient enough to wait for it."

Nell turned the two halves over in her small hands. On the back of each, in Agnes's careful pencil, someone had written a few words, and the girl read them aloud slowly, one after the other. Then she climbed down from the bed in her socks and carried both pieces behind the curtain, where her mother was already awake and reaching out.