Black dotwork and blackwork tattoo on a calf of three stacked balloons with grinning faces, two bats and a small figure hanging from a string.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Stacked balloons with skeletal characters on a calf

Blackwork · Calf · Black and grey · Photo

A photograph of a black tattoo on the lower leg showing three round balloons stacked vertically, each with a face or spiral in solid black. Two small bats sit either side of the balloons, and a small figure hangs from a string below the lowest balloon. The solid black areas contrast with stippled dotwork shading along the balloon edges, and the design is shown in black ink only against a dark grey background.

Blackwork Dotwork Calf Balloon Bat Spiral String Character

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit nearer, and mind the dog, he's had his supper and will want your bread. You asked how the three balloons came to the Hallett place, and I'll tell it the way my grandmother told it, though she always took a drink before the bit about the bats.

Keep reading

Second week of the hard frost, a grey man came up the lane with a bundle of bladders on string, each one blown round as a swede and painted on the skin. The first had a face so mean the hens wouldn't go near it. The second had a spiral of hair like wet black rope. The third grinned with stitches and had two dark pits where the eyes should be. He wanted a bed and a penny for the loan of the barn. Old Hallett gave him the hayloft, and watched him tie the strings to the beam with knots no sailor would own.

In the morning the loft was empty and the balloons were gone, but the strings had been cut clean, and something small hung from the lowest one, a dark little figure with its feet kicking at nothing. Two bats sat on the gatepost as if they'd been paid to. The hens laid no eggs for a month, and nobody slept properly until Hallett's wife climbed up with a lantern and a pair of shears and cut that last string herself.

She said the figure dropped into the straw with a sound like a sigh. When they swept the loft in spring they found only a black tangle of thread, twisted into the shape of a grin, and beside it the grey man's penny, still warm from somebody's pocket. Hallett took it to the crossroads and dropped it in the ditch, and that is the end of that, though the dog still won't go up the loft ladder.