Black and grey engraved-style tattoo of a cat's head shaped like a balloon, tied by a string to a hand, on the outer thigh.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Cat balloon held by a hand on a thigh

Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

A cat's head forms the balloon, with its ears, eyes and nose drawn in fine stippling and hatching. A thin line runs down from the balloon to a hand with a cuffed sleeve, holding the string between its fingers. The shading is in black and grey, with the image centred on the thigh against pale skin.

Thigh Cat Balloon Hand String

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Win, you will not believe what Dad did at the Whitsun fair. He sold his last balloon to a girl with a gap in her front teeth, and then he sat on the upturned crate and wouldn't say a word until the lights came on.

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The balloon was the cat, the grey and white one with the crooked ear he'd had painted on the rubber before the war. Nobody bought it because its face looked too knowing. It watched you over the stall as if it had money on the outcome. Dad kept the string wound round the cuff of his brown canvas sleeve, the one Mum patched three times, so the cat couldn't drift off while he counted change.

The girl paid in farthings and asked for the string. Dad handed it over, and then, quite unlike him, he unwound it from his wrist and told her to hold it herself. She walked it down to the sea wall with her shoes in her other hand. By the time I got there the cat was level with the lighthouse, tugging at the line like it knew the way home.

Nobody saw it come down. Dad says it's still up there, somewhere over Kent, making the gulls nervous. I told him that was daft. He only smiled and held out his bare hand, palm up, as if the string were still in it. Love, Edie.