Red balloon with script on the back
Fine line · Back · Mixed · Photo
The tattoo shows a red balloon with a black outline at the top, and a thin black string that curves down into cursive lettering reading let it be. The linework is fine and even, and the balloon is filled with solid red ink with a small amount of shading. The design sits centrally on a plain, lightly textured skin background, with the string ending in a loose curl below the lettering.
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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction
The fleet had been out three nights when Mairi Corran found the balloon caught in the mooring rope, red as a fresh-landed mackerel and still tugging at its string. Her son Donal had bought it at the summer fair for his sister, who was dead of the fever by Martinmas, and nobody in Cullen Harbour had the heart to cut it loose.
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Old Séumas said a string kept a thing where it was. Mairi said nothing. She carried the balloon up the brae to the cairn where the women stood watch for the boats, and she tied the string to a stone so the wind could not take it. Each dusk after that, the wives counted the sails coming round the point, and each dusk Mairi looked at the red shape against the grey sky and counted one more.
On the ninth night the Morag Rose came in with her lamp lit and her nets heavy, and then the Ailsa came, and then nothing else. Mairi went down to the slip with empty hands. Behind her the stone gave way, or she let it, and the balloon rose off the cairn with its string trailing, out over the black water after the boats.
Nobody chased it. By morning the wives had stopped counting, and Mairi sat on the harbour wall with her hands in her lap, watching a red speck go small against the light.
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