Two matching fine line tattoos of an elephant holding a watercolour balloon, one on each of two inner forearms, with the balloons in pink and blue.

Matching elephant and balloon tattoos on forearms

Fine line · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

Two people's arms are shown side by side, each with a fine black outline of a baby elephant tied to a watercolour balloon by a thin string. The balloons are shaded in soft pink, violet and teal, while the elephants and strings are drawn in single black linework with no shading. The pieces mirror each other across the two arms, with the elephants facing towards the balloons on the opposite side.

Fine line Forearm Elephant Balloon String Matching tattoo Watercolour

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The fair was packing up on the Ouse bank when the balloon man let the last two go for a shilling each. Marta took the teal one, the colour of the river under a bridge, and Ilse took the pink one that had faded to the shade of a boiled sweet. Their grandfather had carved two elephants from a single piece of sycamore that winter, small and round in the belly, and each girl had a loop of string to tie to its trunk. The plan was simple. They would hold their balloons at arm's length and walk the elephants home, one on either side of the lane, and nothing would drift off.

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Nothing drifted off for most of a year. They met at the stile every evening and swapped the strings back and forth so each could feel the other's weight at the far end. Ilse learned to knot the way Marta did, with a twist that held in wind. Marta learned that Ilse hummed when she was thinking about something she would not say aloud. Then came the October gale that took the slates off the church roof, and the string Marta had tied to the gate snapped clean through in the night.

In the morning the teal balloon was gone, and so was the elephant with the chipped ear. Ilse found her own elephant on the stile, its string knotted around the post in a twist she had never seen before, and folded beneath it a note in Marta's cramped handwriting: the wind has taken mine, keep yours tight. Ilse wound the string twice round her wrist and walked the length of the lane with the pink balloon bobbing above her, watching the sky for teal.