Colour tattoo of a house lifted into the air by a bunch of multicoloured balloons on the outer thigh.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

House lifted by balloons on a thigh

Thigh · Colour · Photo

A small house with a pitched roof and lit windows is carried upward by a cluster of balloons in red, orange, yellow, green, blue and purple. The ink uses soft shading on the house walls and roof, with the balloon strings drawn as thin dark lines. The tattoo sits alone on the skin, with the balloons at the top and the house below, against a plain background.

Thigh Balloon House

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Marion, you asked me to write properly when anything happened on nights, so here is something that happened. At ten past three the bed in bay four was empty, the window at the end of the corridor was open a crack, which is against every rule we have, and Mrs Pilling's bunch of birthday balloons had come untied from the drip stand and were bumping against the ceiling tiles like they wanted out.

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I found her at the window with her slippers in one hand and the balloon strings wrapped twice around the other. She was eighty-one and had been asking all week about number fourteen, Carrow Street, the back bedroom where she and Ted had lived for fifty-three years before the council started knocking things down. She said she had only meant to see whether the house was still there from up high. I didn't tell her the view from the third floor is mostly the car park and a bus shelter. I just sat on the radiator and held the other end of the string with her.

We talked until the sky went the colour of weak tea. She told me Ted once painted the front door the wrong shade of green and never quite forgave himself, and that the house would have gone up with the balloons if he'd been there to fix the chimney first. Around five she let go of the string herself, very carefully, the way you'd put down a cup you were done with. Nothing went anywhere. The balloons just drifted to the floor and lay there, purple and orange, like they'd been waiting for permission.

I drew the house on the back of a blood chart while the kettle boiled, a little box with a roof and two lit windows, and tied it to my own wrist with a bit of bandage. Mrs Pilling says she'll have it framed when she gets home. Come and see it when you visit, and bring the good biscuits.