Two forearms show a solid black silhouette of a girl reaching out on the left arm and a red heart-shaped balloon with a black string on the right arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Silhouette girl and heart balloon on forearms

Forearm · Mixed · Photo

The left forearm carries a solid black silhouette of a young girl with her arm extended, shown in profile with a dress-like shape and no interior detail. The right forearm has a red heart-shaped balloon with a thin black string trailing below it. The black areas are dense and even, the red is solid, and the plain dark top and grey jeans in the background keep the focus on the two tattoos.

Forearm Girl Silhouette Balloon Heart String

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The string slips through your fingers just as the band swings into the last waltz of the night, and by the time you've turned, the heart is already drifting above the cloakroom hatch, red against the nicotine-yellow ceiling. Nobody else on the sprung maple floor looks up. Your mother is somewhere near the urn of tea, your uncle is trying to lead a cousin through a foxtrot, and you are small enough that the crowd at the doors is all knees and sequins.

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You push through them anyway. The girl in the green dress by the stage is still dancing with her eyes shut, and you think, quite clearly, that the balloon is the only thing in the Palais that knows where it is going. Alf, the doorman, with a moustache like a yard brush, gives you a wink and props the side door open onto the promenade. Salt air and the slap of the tide come in with the cold.

Outside, the heart has caught on the railing of the pier-head lamp. You stand on your toes with one arm up, fingers stretched just short. The string dangles a hand's width out of reach. You think about calling for someone, then decide against it, because a thing you cannot reach is a thing you can still want, and at seven that feels like a kind of promise.

When you finally go back in, the band is packing up and your mother is asking where on earth you have been. You don't tell her. You walk back across the floor with your hands empty and your arm still raised, as though the sky has only borrowed something from you and might, one evening, bring it back down.