Black and grey fine line tattoo of a shaded balloon on the upper back, with the handwritten script phrase Sometimes you need to let things go trailing from its string.

Balloon and script quote on upper back

Fine line · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A black and white photograph of a tattoo on the upper back near the shoulder blade. A shaded balloon sits at the top right, and its string runs diagonally down to the left as a line of handwritten script reading Sometimes you need to let things go. The linework is thin and crisp, with soft grey shading on the balloon, and the plain skin background keeps the focus on the tattoo.

Fine line Lettering Back Balloon Script Quote String Handwriting

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The rain had got into the helium again, so the balloons sagged on their strings like wet washing, and I was ready to pack up when the boy came under my awning with a fifty pence piece clenched in his fist. He was perhaps nine, in a school jumper gone dark at the shoulders, and he pointed at the single silver one tucked behind the bunch, the one I kept because its shine had dulled.

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"That one," he said. "It has to go up over the big clock." I asked him why, and he said his nan had told him that things rise if you let them, and he wanted to see if it was true. I unhooked it and handed him the string, and he took it the way people take a hot cup, careful and too quick. Then he stood there in the drizzle with the balloon bobbing above him, not letting go, and the stallholders stopped shouting to watch.

I have sold thousands of balloons and never once watched one leave. You sell the string, you take the coin, and the thing is someone else's problem by the time it reaches the rooftops. So I stood beside him, which felt like a kind of trespass. His hand was shaking. He said his nan had gone into the hospital on Tuesday and wouldn't be home for a while, and that she liked the sky, so the balloon should go to her window.

He opened his fingers. It didn't rise straight. It wandered east over the bus station, shrinking to a grey bead against the cloud, and the string hung from nothing for a second before the wind took it. The boy didn't cry. He turned to me with his hand still curled, empty, and asked if he could have his coin back. I told him it was already gone, and he nodded as if that were the right answer, and walked out into the rain with nothing in his hand at all.