Fine line and dotwork tattoo on a calf showing a bearded face in a red dotted balloon, with a paper plane above and a small house with a red heart below.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Surreal balloon face and house on a calf

Fine line · Calf · Mixed · Photo

The tattoo shows a bearded face with heavy-lidded eyes inside a large red balloon shaded with dots, with a black paper plane above it. Below, a geometric open-framed basket hangs from a thin line to a small house with a red heart in its doorway, set on a patch of shaded ground. Black fine linework is combined with dotwork shading on the balloon, and the red is the only colour against black ink.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You tie the balloon to the bow rail of the narrowboat Thrift just after the lock keeper at Tiddley Lock waves you through without looking up from his crossword. The balloon is red and round and has a face painted on it, a bearded man with heavy lids who looks like he has been awake since the last war. Your sister bought it at the fair in Stourport and said it would keep the midges off. It does nothing of the kind, but it does keep the drizzle off your face when you sit under it, and you have come to think that is the same thing.

Keep reading

The paper plane arrives on the third morning, skidding down the cut from upstream and catching on the mooring pin. Someone has folded it from a page of a ledger, the columns still showing, and written across one wing in pencil: Ask the house. Upriver there is only the cottage at Hob's Weir, its door painted the colour of a plum, empty since the flood. You untie the balloon anyway and let it lead you, the string paying out through your fingers, tugging at each bend like a dog that knows the way better than you do.

The cottage is not empty. A wire basket hangs from the gutter on a thin line, holding nothing but a tangle of hair ribbon, and beneath it the earth has been turned into a neat dark circle. On the doorstep, where the paint has peeled, a small red heart is pinned to the sill with a single nail, still warm when you press your palm to it. The balloon bobs, pleased with itself, and rises a foot higher, as if it had been waiting all this time for you to stop being sensible about things.

You leave the heart where it is. You leave the plane on the sill with its pencilled instruction still legible. When you cast off, the balloon turns once above the water to look back at the cottage, the way a passenger does from the back of a bus, and then it swings round and tows you gently downstream towards the sea.

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