Black and grey fine line tattoo of a shaded balloon and the script quote Sometimes you need to let things go, running diagonally across the upper back.

Balloon and quote across the upper back

Fine line · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A black and white photograph of a person's upper back, showing a shaded balloon near the top of the shoulder and a handwritten style quote reading Sometimes you need to let things go. The script is thin, delicate linework that runs diagonally down towards the lower left, with the balloon's string fading into the final words. The tones are soft greys with a clean, plain background, and the photograph is well lit and in focus.

Fine line Lettering Back Balloon Quote Script

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The balloon was red when Tom won it on the tombola at the church fête, and it stayed red right up until the moment it slipped his fist. He was six. He stood at the bottom of Gran's garden with his mouth open and his palm still curled round nothing, and I watched the string whip past the runner beans and over the shed roof.

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Gran did not run after it. She was pegging sheets and simply kept pegging. "It'll come down somewhere it's wanted," she said, which was the sort of thing she said about cats, lost keys and the Hendersons' divorce. Tom wanted a search party. I wanted him to stop crying so I could get back to my tea. We stood among the lupins for ten minutes looking up, and the sky over the allotments held nothing but a gull and the flat grey of the afternoon.

Later, when he was in the bath, I found her in the greenhouse tying tomato canes with the last of the raffia. I asked her whether it hurt, letting go of things like that. She didn't turn round. "Only the first bit," she said. "After that your hands are just empty, and you find out what else they can hold."

Tom asked every morning for a fortnight whether the balloon had come back. In July a man from the rail depot rang to say it had been found snagged on a signal post near Haddenham, still faintly red. Gran said she would have it framed if he wanted it. He didn't. He said to leave it where it was.