Black and grey tattoo of a house lifted into the sky by a bunch of balloons above clouds, drawn in bold outline with grey shading on a lower leg.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

House lifted by balloons on a leg

Calf · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows a two-storey house with a chimney, lifted into the sky by a cluster of balloons. Bold black outlines define the house, balloons and cloud shapes, with grey shading on the roof, walls and clouds. The design is set against a plain background, with the clouds framing the balloons at the top of the composition.

Calf House Balloon Cloud Chimney Sky

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The balloons turned up on a Tuesday, forty-one of them, knotted to the chimney of number nine Thornbury Lane by someone who had clearly never climbed a ladder. Ada Quill came out in her dressing gown with a mug of tea going cold in her hand and looked up at them, red and yellow and a bruised shade of plum, tugging at the brickwork like dogs wanting a walk.

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The council had been trying to knock the place down since the spring. A letter about subsidence, a letter about the bypass, then a man with a clipboard who called her 'love' and measured the front gate without asking. Ada wrote back on her good notepaper every time. Her late husband Frank had laid that chimney himself in 1971 and had never once been told it was crooked. She stayed out of spite, and out of a stubbornness the neighbours mistook for grief.

On the Thursday she made up her mind. She took the kitchen scissors to the bottom knot, then the tea towel, then the whole length of her washing line, and by teatime the house was rising slowly over the rooftops with the kettle still whistling on the stove. The vicar waved from his lawn. The clipboard man stood in the road with his mouth open. Ada leaned out of the back bedroom window and shouted that the bypass could have the view.

Past the church the allotments unrolled beneath her like a patchwork quilt, and somewhere above the reservoir a gull drifted level with the window to see what all the fuss was about. Ada poured the tea she had been holding since Tuesday, found it still warm, and drank it standing up.