We exhibit the traceless SU (2) character variety of a 6-punctured 2-sphere as a 2-fold branched cover of CP 3 , branched over the singular Kummer surface, with the branch locus in R(S 2 , 6) corresponding to the binary dihedral representations. This follows from an analysis of the map induced on SU (2) character varieties by the 2-fold branched cover Fn−1 → S 2 branched over 2n points, combined with the theorem of Narasimhan-Ramanan which identifies R(F2) with CP 3 . The singular points of R(S 2 , 6) correspond to abelian representations, and we prove that each has a neighborhood in R(S 2 , 6) homeomorphic to a cone on S 2 × S 3 .2010 Mathematics Subject Classification. 57M05, 53D30.