Colourful neo-traditional hot air balloon tattoo with geometric panels and small gem shapes, on the side of the ribs.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Colourful hot air balloon on the ribs

Neo-trad · Ribs · Colour · Photo

A hot air balloon with a patterned envelope of chevrons, scallops and dotted bands, hung from a basket and with a small gem above and below. The linework is bold and black, with the panels filled in solid colour and some soft shading. Bright reds, oranges, yellows, blues and purples dominate, set against pale skin on the side of the torso.

Neo-trad Geometric Ribs Hot air balloon Gem Geometric pattern Chevron Diamond Basket

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The envelope was forty-one panels short when Maud Ferris finally admitted the pattern was wrong. She had cut the chevrons from her late mother's drawer of silk offcuts, scraps never meant for anything grander than headscarves, and the scallops had come out a shade too pink against the yellow. Her husband Dennis stood in the doorway of the Bristol drill hall with a mug of tea going cold in his hand and said nothing, which was how she knew he agreed.

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They unpicked the lower bands at midnight. Maud talked while she worked, the way her mother had talked over quilts, about the bakery on Gloucester Road and the price of paraffin and a girl at the Co-op who could tell a wedding guest from a funeral by how she held a teaspoon. Dennis ran the machine under the lamp and let the rhythm carry them. By three the seams ran true, and the envelope lay across the floor like a sunset somebody had folded neatly.

Dawn came up grey over the Downs when they carried it out to the field. The wind was wrong, westerly and gusting, and the burner roared while the crowd grew restless. Maud pinned two small gems she had saved from her old ring box, one to the crown and one hung from the basket, so there would be something to catch the light. Then the wind turned, quite suddenly, as if embarrassed, and the envelope filled with a sound like someone clapping slowly.

Nobody agrees on the height it reached. What people remember is the moment it cleared the hedge, all those colours lifting like dropped bunting, and a boy in the queue for tea shouting that it had swallowed the sun. Maud kept the chevron offcut that never fitted. It is still folded in her purse, brighter than anything else she owns.