Given a 2-stranded tangle T contained in a ℤ-homology ball Y, we investigate the character variety R(Y, T) of conjugacy classes of traceless SU(2) representations of π1(Y \ T). In particular we completely determine the subspace of binary dihedral representations, and identify all of R(Y, T) for many tangles naturally associated to knots in S 3. Moreover, we determine the image of the restriction map from R(T, Y) to the traceless SU(2) character variety of the 4-punctured 2-sphere (the pillowcase). We give examples to show this image can be non-linear in general, and show it is linear for tangles associated to pretzel knots.