Colour tattoo of a cartoon house with a red chimney, lifted by a cluster of pastel balloons with black outlines, on a forearm.

Cartoon house lifted by colourful balloons

Neo-trad · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A cartoon house with a red chimney and multicoloured walls hangs beneath a large cluster of balloons, joined to it by thin black lines. The balloons are shaped like rounded heads with ears in pink, purple, orange, yellow and teal, and the house has a grey roof, a red door and green and pink walls. Bold black outlines define every element, with soft shading and bright colour fill across a vertical composition on the arm.

Neo-trad Forearm House Balloon Chimney Cartoon Cloud

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mags Tennant had sold the last of the round balloons by the time the Michaelmas fair packed up on the green, but the ones with ears would not go back in the cart. Each one bobbed on its string like a head that had forgotten its body, pink and teal and orange, and the man who ran the coconut shy swore they had been shaped in a tin mould he had bought off a sailor.

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She tied them to the handle of her caravan's brass knocker because she had nowhere else to put them. In the night the wind came off the fens and lifted the whole bunch, and with them the little green-doored house Tom Pell had built from offcuts for his daughter's dolls. Nobody had asked the house to come. It rose past the church clock, its red chimney puffing smoke for a while out of habit, and hung there over the sleeping fairground with the lamps going out one by one below.

Morning found Mags at the field gate with her hands in her pockets, and Tom beside her with a cup of tea gone cold. "We could cut them loose," he said. "Let it come down in the reeds." She said nothing for a long time. Then she went to the cart and fetched the spool of black thread she used for mending the canvas, and the two of them spent the day walking the fen road, calling the house down by name, which was Patience, though no one could remember who had named it.

It came down at dusk, nudging the church weathercock on the way, and settled on the green with its chimney cold. The balloons, grown a little limp, folded themselves against the door. Tom said the paint looked brighter. Mags said the paint always looked brighter after a fright, and that was the first honest thing anyone had said about the house in years.