Two small black finger tattoos on clasped hands: a crescent moon on one finger and a geometric hot air balloon on the neighbouring finger, in fine line style with light shading.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Crescent moon and geometric balloon on fingers

Fine line · Hand · Black and grey · Photo

Two small tattoos sit on adjacent fingers of two clasped hands, one showing a crescent moon and the other a hot air balloon built from angular geometric panels with a small basket below. The linework is thin and mostly solid black, with soft grey shading inside the moon. The ink is black and grey, and the close framing against a blue carpet keeps the focus on the two designs.

Fine line Geometric Hand Crescent moon Hot air balloon Geometric Moon Balloon

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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 step, there, where the path goes soft with sea-wrack. My grandmother used to say the balloon came down on Skerra the year the men stopped rowing out to the far rocks, though nobody could tell you who first saw it. A great green-and-brown thing, all angles, like a bee's cell folded into the sky, hanging over the chapel roof with a basket no bigger than a bread tin. It drifted, the way those things do when there's no one at the ropes. The children ran to it. The old ones stayed by the fire and counted their hens.

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Anne Mhairi Gillies was nine, and she was the one who climbed the wall to look. She said the basket was empty except for a single moon, cut from tin, tied on a string and swinging like a pendulum. She said she took it in her teeth and the balloon lifted her a finger's width off the grass, so light was it, and she let go before it could take her. That is the whole of the story, as far as I know it, and I have told it at more weddings than I care to count.

When she was an old woman herself, Anne Mhairi kept that tin moon on a nail above her door. On the nights the tide came up under the bridge she would take it down and turn it in the lamplight, and say to whoever was sitting with her that the sky only ever asks you to hold still for a moment. Then she'd hang it back up, and the moon would knock against the frame until morning.