Michael Jackson chibi-style: an enormous head on a small body, a grin from ear to ear and black hair flying off in curls. He wears the red jacket — that jacket — over a black shirt, black trousers with a silver buckle, and his arms are held slightly open, as though the music had just stopped. There is no background: the figure is cut out against the fabric.

It is 106 x 182 stitches, about 19 by 33 centimetres on 14-count, with six of every ten cells worked. There are fifteen threads, but one of them is clearly in charge: four stitches in ten are black DMC 310 — hair, shirt, trousers and shoes — and nearly two more are the dark grey that goes with it. So half the piece moves fast, in big blocks, and the fine work sits in two places: the face, where five skin tones share out very few stitches, and the jacket, which takes five different reds for its folds and highlights. The hair is the slow part, because that is where almost all of the pattern's thousand isolated stitches gather — the strands breaking away from the outline. Whole crosses throughout, no halves and no backstitch.