Small outline tattoo of two mouse-ear head balloons on the inner wrist, one filled with yellow and one with black.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Two mouse-ear balloons on a wrist

Forearm · Mixed · Photo

Two balloons shaped like round mouse heads with two ears each, drawn with bold black outlines and trailing black strings that cross near the bottom. The left balloon is filled with yellow shading and the right one is solid black, and the lines are clean and even. The design sits alone on the inner wrist against plain skin, with a little space around it.

Forearm Balloon Mouse ears String

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Two balloons were caught on the lighthouse rail when Ailsa came up the steps with the morning wash, and she stopped with the sheet over her shoulder to look at them. They were round as heads and had two ears each, the way the children on Skerra drew them on slates. Nobody on the island had bought a balloon in forty years. The last had come over on the mainland ferry in a parcel with a letter nobody could read, because the sea had got into it.

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Her father said they were only air that had been given a reason to float, and that the reason had run out. Ailsa said that was a poor sort of reason and untied the strings from the rail. The threads were black and fine and went down past the gallery to where the rocks were tarred from the storm. She followed them down with her wet hands, and the balloons came with her, bumping gently against the stone, one gold where the sun caught it and one as black as the inside of the lamp room.

At the foot of the tower the strings were knotted together into a single line that ran out over the water. The fishing boats were still beyond the skerry, and the mist had come in thick enough to hide the bell buoy. Ailsa held the line as her father had taught her to hold a rope in a swell, and she felt the balloons pull east, then west, then together, the way a shoal turns before it goes under.

She let the line go. The gold one dipped first, then the black, and they sailed low over the mist with their ears up. Her father lit the lamp at dusk and saw two round shapes hanging over the rocks in its beam. The boats came in on the light that night, and nobody on Skerra ever asked where the balloons had gone.