Dotwork and geometric thigh tattoo of a hot air balloon, a sailing ship and a whale in black with teal and red accents, shown on the outer thigh.

Balloon, ship and whale on thigh

Dotwork · Thigh · Mixed · Photo

A hot air balloon rises above a sailing ship and a whale, set against a night sky of dots and overlapping triangles, with a geometric moon in the upper right. The linework is fine and the shading is built from stippled dots and solid black fills, with teal and red used sparingly in the triangles. The large design wraps across the outer thigh and fills most of the frame.

Dotwork Geometric Thigh Hot air balloon Sailing ship Whale Moon Triangle Geometric shape Night sky Dot

Find an artist for this

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

Mind the rope, it's older than your mother and twice as honest. Sit. The balloon was Ottilie Marsh's idea and she never once let me forget it. Her father had drawn charts for the Admiralty, every coast stitched to the next with triangles, and he swore each line was true to a hair. She grew up believing the world was a net you could lift by one corner.

Keep reading

So when the Dorothea, a three-masted ship out of Hull, lost her bearings in the fog off the Dogger Bank, Ottilie bought a silk balloon from a fairground man who owed her money, and we rose at dawn with a crate of lamp oil and a compass that had been dropped twice. From the basket the ship looked like dark stitching on grey cloth. Ottilie drew a triangle across the water, from the lighthouse to the church spire to the single red buoy, and said that was where we were.

Below us, something broke the surface and sounded. A whale, grey as slate, turned slowly under the keel as if it were reading the hull. Ottilie did not look down. She counted the stars that had not yet gone, dotting them onto her sheet, and when the moon came up round and white over the fog she sketched it as a net of lines, as though she could catch it in her hand.

We found the harbour by noon. Ottilie folded the chart, tucked it inside her coat, and never sold the balloon. What she kept was the whale's count. She swore it had sounded three times, once for each corner of the map, and that the sea had been listening all along.