# Nobody's taken the pin out yet > One photograph, one pin, years on a shared noticeboard — the corners have curled right off the cork and it's still nobody's job to take it down. August 22, 2026 · https://justog.club/stories/the-photo-curling-on-an-office-noticeboard One photograph, one pin, near the top edge. The corners have curled away from the board on every side, and a ring of cork shows through around it, speckled and warm against the flat colour behind. Nobody has taken it down. Nobody has pinned anything else up either. ## Why is there just one thing on the board? Because a shared noticeboard doesn't belong to anyone in particular, which is exactly why so little ever gets added to it. Putting something up takes a small, specific kind of nerve — deciding your thing is worth the space, in a spot everyone who passes will see. Most people don't bother. So a board like this holds whatever went up once, in a moment somebody had a reason to, and then just keeps holding it, because adding a second thing takes the same nerve all over again and taking the first thing down takes a different kind entirely. ## Why have the corners curled like that? Because a single pin holds the centre still and leaves everything else free to move. Paper pinned at one point isn't flat under tension the way a taped or framed print is — the sheet itself absorbs and gives up moisture from the room around it, and with nothing holding the edges down, that movement shows up as a curl away from the surface. It happens slowly, over the kind of stretch measured in years rather than weeks, which is part of why it reads as neglect rather than damage. Nobody did this to it. The room did, gradually, while it wasn't looking. ## What makes a good version of this? How far the curl has gone, and how much cork shows around it. A small, even lift at each corner reads as a year or two. A deep curl that's pulled the paper noticeably off the board, with visible daylight underneath one edge, reads as much longer — long enough that whoever walks past it stopped seeing it as something on the wall and started seeing it as part of the wall. One pin does more work here than several would; it's the single point holding the whole thing in place that makes the rest of the curl legible. ## Do I need permission to print a photo that isn't mine? If it shows a real, identifiable person, generally yes, though it's a smaller ask than it sounds. The photograph belongs to whoever's in it or whoever took it, and that ownership is licensable — plenty of shared spaces run photos of people who gave the nod once, years ago, and never thought about it again. If asking isn't realistic, the shirt still works without a face on it at all: a pinned rectangle, curling at its corners, tells the whole story of the object without needing anyone's likeness attached to it. ## Does this only work for a photograph? No — a curling scrap of anything left up past its use does the same thing to the space around it. A clipping, a memo, a hand-drawn notice for something that happened long ago and never got taken down — a noticeboard collects all of these the same way, and any of them curls the same way once it's held by a single pin for long enough. It's a milder version of [the deferred decision on a taped-shut film canister](/stories/the-roll-that-was-never-developed): nobody chose to leave it up either, exactly — nobody's chosen otherwise. The photograph version is just the one people recognise fastest, because everyone's walked past a board with exactly one thing left on it. ## Isn't a curling photo just something that should've come down? That's one reading, but leaving it up is doing something too — it's saying nobody's had a reason to take it down. Removing another person's thing off a shared board takes a decision, and most people would rather not make it on someone else's behalf. So the curl isn't neglect exactly — it's the shape a low-stakes kind of permission takes when nobody's revoked it and nobody's likely to. That's a different, quieter fact than the one on [a stack still waiting to be sorted into who gets what](/stories/the-doubles-you-gave-away), where somebody clearly has to act. Here, staying up is the action. ## Does it print well? Yes — the curl and the cork are both flat shapes once you simplify them, and that's what fabric wants. Keep the paper itself close to a single flat tone with a hard drawn edge where it lifts off the board; a soft photographic gradient across the curl goes muddy at print size. The cork corona works best as an irregular speckled field rather than a clean ring — it's the one place in the design that can carry real texture, because it isn't standing in for a photograph. Khaki, olive or a faded tan all read as noticeboard rather than fashion colour. Bone for the paper and one hazard orange for the cork and pin is enough — two flat inks against the garment. ## How do I get one made? Describe the board at [JustOG](/) — how far the corners have curled, where the pin sits, how much cork shows through. Pick a direction, drag the crop frame, see it composited on the real garment, and it's made to order and shipped. Designs other people have published are in the [shop](/shop). Whoever put it up doesn't work there any more. The pin does.