Colourful dotwork tattoo of a house lifted by balloons under a moon, set in an oval landscape on the upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Balloon house in an oval on an upper arm

Dotwork · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

An oval scene shows a small house with a red heart on its gable, held aloft by a bunch of multicoloured balloons, with a crescent moon and small stars above. Below, rolling hills, trees and a winding path with a bridge are built up from fine stippled dots and hatched lines. The house and balloons are filled with red, yellow, green, blue and pink, while the landscape and outline stay in black and grey.

Dotwork Neo-trad Upper arm House Balloon Moon Star Hill Path Bridge Tree Heart Landscape

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nobody at the reunion remembered the balloons except Dean Corrigan, which is how I knew he'd been drinking since the car park. He stood by the buffet with a paper plate of sausage rolls and told the function room about the summer we were sixteen, when Mr Hobday's geography trip got rained off and we spent the afternoon lying on Kathy's dad's allotment, drawing houses on the back of the permission slips.

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Kathy drew the heart. She gave the little house a red gable like a valentine, then said whoever lived there had to be someone who had never once been lonely. We looked at each other and laughed, because none of us could name anyone like that. The plan was simple. Fill a house with a bunch of balloons, tie it to the hill above the reservoir, and let it go the day we all left Keighley. We said it like a dare. Kathy never said it like one.

She found me by the coat rail later, holding a carrier bag that clinked. Forty helium balloons from the party shop on Market Street, the ones she'd bought for her leaving do in Lisbon, the leaving do she'd not mentioned to anyone. She'd kept the old permission slip folded in her purse. We stood in the car park under the sodium lights and tied the bag to the railings with a ribbon, and when the wind caught it, the colours lifted off one by one.

Dean came out with his jacket over his shoulder and asked what was so funny. Neither of us could tell him. Kathy watched the last red balloon drift over the Co-op roof until it was only a dot, and then she went back inside to find her coat.