Last year, the night before Mother’s Day, Shannon Blount made a request. Devastated by the death of 3-year-old Ryan a little over a week before, she asked her husband if he could set up an appointment with a tattoo artist. Now she wears Ryan on the inside of her arm; the red-haired boy stands smiling and holding a red balloon.

A few weeks after getting the tattoo, she was sitting in a Monterey, California, park with her kids when a woman approached and mentioned Ryan. “At first I wasn’t sure what she was talking about,” Blount explained. “But then she tapped her inner arm and I looked down and, of course, there was Ryan on my arm.” Blount isn’t his mother, his aunt, or even a friend of his parents. She’s one of several strangers who have gotten memorial tattoos after his story went viral on Instagram in May 2014.

Ryan and his parents, Jacqui and Dan Saldana, lived in South Pasadena, California. They made regular trips to Disneyland, where Jacqui and Dan got engaged and Ryan spent the last morning of his life. That afternoon, while visiting a relative’s house with his parents, Ryan was hit by a pickup truck and pronounced dead at the scene. The family witnessed the collision.

In 2011, Jacqui started a blog called Baby Boy Bakery, where she shared recipes, crafts, and intimate dispatches from her life as a mother. The day after Ryan’s death, Jacqui’s friend and fellow blogger Alissa Circle shared a plea on her own site:

Today as I sat with Jacqui she gave me the honor of sharing her story. ...

They need us to rally

They need us to pray

to share

to love

to remember…

...Ryan. Will you grab a picture from Jacqui’s Instagram feed, and post it to yours? Will you share words of encouragement and tag #RedBalloonsforRyan?

Other mommy bloggers followed suit, and Ryan’s story spread from small-time sites to ones with hundreds of thousands of daily readers. Strangers began sharing Ryan’s picture along with the hashtag, inserting him into their Instagram streams of home-cooked meals, school recitals, soccer games, and sunsets. Within a week, actors Sophia Bush and Tori Spelling had shared Ryan’s story, Instagram followers were releasing commemorative red balloons as far away as South Africa, and an auction benefiting Jacqui and her husband, Dan, had raised $67,555. Ellen DeGeneres brought Jacqui onstage during an episode of her talk show.

Instead of going silent after Ryan’s death, Jacqui began writing candidly about her grief on her Instagram account and blog. Her following has exploded. For women who haven’t lost a child, Jacqui’s posts offer a window into their worst nightmare, when something as simple a Band-Aid stuck on the sidewalk serves as a message from a deceased child. “Sleep is not the same,” she wrote in another post, a selfie taken with a backdrop of striped sheets. “We stay up late to avoid it. often it's filled with replayed images of the day our life fell apart. sometimes there is nothing replaying, my mind just goes dark. I long for the nights I can go to sleep with ease & maybe dream happy about my son.” Her supporters paint portraits of Ryan, share their DIY-Ryan inspired decor, and dress their kids in clothing emblazoned with Ryan’s image. Today, Jacqui has over 285,000 Instagram followers, and #redballoonsforryan has been used over 32,000 times.