Four views of a full sleeve tattoo on an arm, with a watercolour Union Jack, a punk figure in a long coat, a stencil girl with a heart balloon and a quote in script, in mixed black and grey and colour

Union Jack sleeve with punk and stencil figures

Realism · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

The sleeve combines a watercolour-style Union Jack across the upper arm with a shaded, portrait-like figure of a punk in a long dark coat and a stencil-style girl holding a heart-shaped balloon on the forearm. Shading is largely black and grey with soft wash edges, while the red and blue of the flag and small red hearts add colour. The four photographs show the sleeve from front, side and back angles against a black and white chequered floor.

Realism Upper arm Forearm Balloon Heart Quote Flag Sleeve

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nobody in Margate believed me when I said the balloon was the only thing Dessie ever let go of on purpose. He worked the pier railings every Saturday with a tin of spray and a sheet of card he'd cut with a Stanley knife, and the girl he kept stencilling was always the same girl: black plait, red coat, one hand raised to a heart-shaped balloon that never once came down.

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The flag came later, painted across the back of the bus shelter the summer the council tried to scrub the town clean. The red and blue ran into each other as if the rain had got at them, and Dessie said that was the whole point. A country that looked finished from the far end of the prom and came apart up close. The lads from the chip shop thought he was being clever. Mostly he was just cold and out of paint.

The man in the long dark coat, the one with the hair standing up like a struck match, appeared on the shelter door the week the chip shop shut. Nobody had asked for him. He stood there with his hands in his pockets, looking at the girl as if she owed him a pound and he was too polite to say so.

The council men painted over everything in October. I went down the next morning with a flask and found the balloon still there, a small red heart in the corner where the damp had pushed the new grey back off the brick. He'd never told me he'd left it. I poured the tea, stood in the wind longer than I needed to, and didn't scrape it off.