Pencil and ink sketch of a small girl with her hair in a bun, holding balloon strings behind her back, with the words Sometimes you have to let go, to be able to move on around a circle.

Girl releasing balloons with circular quote sketch

Black and grey · Flash

A pencil and ink sketch drawn in a notebook shows a small cartoon girl with her hair in a bun, looking up at two balloons that rise away from a string held behind her back. The words Sometimes you have to let go, to be able to move on are written in a loose circle around her, in a handwritten lettering style. The linework is fine and the balloons are partly shaded with hatching, with no colour used.

Girl Balloon Quote Text Sketch

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nell had held the string for most of an hour, and at a quarter past eleven the last tram on Fargate sighed away and left us in the wet. Her hand was tucked behind her back, the way she kept it when she was about to be brave, and three balloons leaned above her head against the orange glow of the streetlamps, tugging like dogs at a gate.

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I ran the late kiosk on the corner, the one with the flickering sign that promised phone chargers and hot food, and I had watched her buy the balloons from the lad outside the bus station. She had paid him in coins she had counted twice. "They're not mine to keep," she told me, though I had not asked. "Dad said they'd float higher than the cathedral if I let them."

"Well, you've got to let go sometime," I said, which was the sort of thing I said at work, and she gave me a look that would have stripped paint. So I said nothing else. I waited. The wind came up off the Don and pushed the balloons together until their strings knotted. She reached for the knot, then stopped, and I watched her decide.

The red one went first, a quick shape lifting over the town hall roof with a shiver. The blue one hung on a while, bumping against the scaffold on the bank, before it found the air. Nell kept the white one. She pulled it down by its string and tucked the end into the pocket of her coat. "That one's for next time," she said, and went off towards the bus station without looking up. The two that had gone climbed on past the clock tower until I could no longer tell them from the stars.