Black ink drawing of a small girl with her hair in a bun, gazing up as she holds three balloons on strings, drawn on a white background with no body part visible.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Girl holding three balloons, ink drawing

Black and grey · Flash

A small girl in a short dress stands on a dark, shaded base and looks up at three round balloons tied to her hand. The drawing uses loose, sketchy pen linework with cross-hatched shading on the dress, hair and balloons. It is rendered entirely in black ink on white, with open space around the figure.

Girl Balloon Child Dress Hair bun

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The balloons had been bought for the wrong side of the river, so Maud had to carry them across. The bridge at Hollin Ford had a guard who wrote down everything that crossed it, and he had once fined a goose for being feathered without a licence. Maud was seven years old, had a coin in her shoe, and her grandmother had sold her three round balloons, pale as eggs, on the understanding that the string would come back.

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She tied the strings around her wrist and stepped onto the planks. The wind came up off the water and the balloons leaned toward the far bank, where the brown hills began, pulling her a little onto her toes with every step. The guard looked up from his ledger, pen behind one ear. "What have you to declare?" "Three," said Maud. "Three what?" "Three things I am taking up to see the sky." He frowned at the balloons, then at the girl, then at the dark water beneath, which had gone very still as if listening.

Rules are rules, he said, and he began counting the planks aloud, one for each step. But the balloons were quicker than his counting. By the eleventh plank Maud's heels were clear of the boards and she was rising, her skirt flapping like a flag and her hair coming loose from its bun. The guard reached for her sleeve and missed. Below them the river turned over once, like a sleeper, and was still again.

On the far bank she came down softly in the long grass and untied one balloon from her wrist. She walked back to the end of the bridge and held the string out across the gap. He had never been given anything without a form for it. He took the string, looked at it for a long time, and wrote nothing down.