Colourful watercolour-style tattoo of a house lifted by bunches of balloons, with the script 'Adventure is out there' below, on a calf.

Balloon house and script on a calf

Lettering · Calf · Colour · Photo

A house with a pitched roof and chimney is held aloft by a large cluster of balloons, drawn with fine black linework and filled with soft, layered colour. Loose coloured splashes surround the balloons, and the words 'Adventure is out there' sit in black script beneath the house. The design is centred on the lower leg and shown against a plain wall and wooden floor.

Lettering Calf Balloon House Script Splashes

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Pearl, the balloons arrived on Tuesday, forty-one of them, bought from the rack outside the chip shop in Mablethorpe because Mr Coley wouldn't hear of anything else. He tied them to the chimney of Number Nine with baler twine and a sailor's knot he learnt off the lifeboat men, and he said that if the wind came round to the north-east the house would lift like a kite and we'd see the Wash from the attic window.

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The wind didn't come round. Instead the guests came down to the promenade to watch: a retired dentist in his bathing trunks, two girls from Leeds sharing a flask, the Pemberton twins who have never once agreed on anything. Mr Coley stood on the sand with his hands in his cardigan pockets, looking up at the roof as if it owed him money.

On the third evening he climbed out onto the slates with a thermos and a torch and sat there until the tide came in. I went up after him with the kettle. He said he'd been thinking about the house since his wife went, how it had never once been anywhere but here. "Adventure is out there, Hilda," he said, nodding at the sea. "It's only a question of whether the house comes too."

We cut nothing loose. This morning the balloons were still straining at their knots, bright as boiled sweets against the grey, and Mr Coley has the kettle on and is writing tide times on the back of a breakfast menu. I think he means to go. I've packed the good tea towels just in case. Yours, Win.