Black and grey fine line tattoo of a heart-shaped balloon with a long trailing string on the ribs.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Heart balloon on the ribs

Fine line · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A small heart-shaped balloon with a single thin string trailing downwards is tattooed on the side of the ribcage. The heart is filled with loose, looping interior lines, and the string is drawn as one delicate, unbroken stroke. The image is black and white, with soft shading on the skin and grey fabric filling the lower frame.

Fine line Ribs Balloon Heart String

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The balloon man at the Verrow crossing sold his last heart at ten past seven, to a boy who had no coins and a fist full of wet sweets. I watched the exchange from the window of booth four, where I had been stamping lorry manifests since dawn. Nobody else in the queue looked up. Diesel hung over the tarmac, and the barrier arm lifted and dropped for everyone except us.

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The heart was red once, he told me, before the sun got at it. He had tied the string himself, a single length of cotton carried from his grandmother's loom in a shoebox through three checkpoints. Guards had asked to see it. He showed them the knot and they let it through, because nobody counts a string as anything worth taking. I thought about that for the rest of the shift, the way a thing that weighs nothing can still bend a whole queue.

At half past four my supervisor waved the last car through and the boy came back. The balloon had drifted against the wire fence and caught itself in the coils of barbed loops, the string stretched taut and pale. He wanted it back. I climbed the fence post with my scissors in my pocket, and then I did not cut. I worked the string free loop by loop, the way you would unpick a skein gone wrong, until the heart came loose and rose clear over the car park.

It went up slowly, lifting over the lorries and the guard hut and the grey river beyond, its string paying out behind it like a line of ink. The boy shouted something I could not hear. I held the end until it pulled taut and slipped from my fingers, and then I watched it go on without me, a small heart drawn in one unbroken stroke across the sky.