Colour tattoo of a house lifted by a bunch of red, blue, yellow and orange balloons, with a line of script above, on the side of a torso at the ribs.

Balloon-lifted house on the side ribs

Ribs · Colour · Photo

The tattoo shows a small two-storey house with a chimney and a yellow upper section, held aloft by a cluster of balloons in red, pink, blue, yellow and orange, with the strings running down to the house. A line of dark script sits above the balloons, and the house and balloons are shaded with soft gradients. The design is set against the skin of the side of the torso, with the balloons filling the upper area and the house sitting lower down near the waistband of the jeans.

Ribs Balloon House Script Quote

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Shut the hatch, you're letting the damp in on the tea. Right. Where was I? Ah, the house. Ada Pruett's house, yellow up top and red brick below, with a chimney that leaned like a drunk man at a bus stop.

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Ada had buried Len in March. He'd spent forty years promising to take her to the sea, and every year the promise sat on the mantelpiece beside the clock, going a little more dusty. So one morning in June she walked down to the lock, where a lad was selling balloons from a bundle as big as a haystack, and she bought the lot. Red, pink, blue, the orange of a traffic cone, all of them straining to be let go. She tied them to the chimney one knot at a time, then made herself a cup of tea while she waited.

When the cup was empty, the house lifted off its foundations as easy as a loaf coming out of a tin. It sailed over the gasworks. It sailed past a heron, who looked deeply offended. The folk on the towpath shrank to the size of shirt buttons and then smaller, and Ada, who had never once in her life looked down with pleasure, found she was enjoying it immensely.

The wind carried her west, not east, which she took as a sign that the sea was not the only thing worth finding. Somewhere above Abingdon she untied all but one balloon and let the house sink gently into a field of Friesians, who did not look up. She walked the rest of the way on her own two feet, and by the time she reached the coast the sea was waiting, grey and enormous, exactly as Len had described it. She stood at the edge a long while. Then she turned round, because the adventure had only just started, and a single red balloon, still tied to her wrist, bobbed along beside her all the way home.